History of the Gnostic Catholic Church

by T. Apiryon

Jules Doinel and The Gnostic Church of France

The founder of the Gnostic Church was Jules-Benoît Stanislas Doinel du Val-Michel (1842-1903). Doinel was a librarian, a Grand Orient Freemason, an antiquarian and a practicing Spiritist. In his frequent attempts at communication with spirits, he was confronted with a recurring vision of Divine Femininity under various aspects. He gradually developed the conviction that his destiny involved his participation in the restoration of the feminine aspect of divinity to its proper place in religion.

In 1888, while working as archivist for the Library of Orléans, he discovered an original charter dated 1022 which had been written by Canon Stephan of Orléans, a school master and forerunner of the Cathars who taught gnostic doctrines. Stephan was burned later the same year for heresy.

Doinel became fascinated by the drama of the Cathars and their heroic and tragic resistance against the forces of the Pope. He began to study their doctrines and those of their predecessors, the Bogomils, the Paulicians, the Manichaeans and the Gnostics. As his studies progressed, he became increasingly convinced that Gnosticism was the true religion behind Freemasonry.

One night in 1888, the “Eon Jesus” appeared to Doinel in a vision and charged him with the work of establishing a new church. He spiritually consecrated Doinel as “Bishop of Montségur and Primate of the Albigenses.” After his vision of the Eon Jesus, Doinel began attempting to contact Cathar and Gnostic spirits in seances in the salon of Maria de Mariategui, Lady Caithness, Duchesse de Medina Pomar.

Doinel had long been associated with Lady Caithness, who was a prominent figure in the French Spiritist circles of the time, a disciple of Anna Kingsford, and leader of the French branch of the Theosophical Society. She considered herself a reincarnation of Mary Stuart; and interestingly, a Spiritist communication in 1881 had foreshadowed to her a revolution in religion which would result in a “New Age of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit.” Doinel’s Gnostic seances were attended by other notable occultists of various sects; including the Abbé Roca, an Ex-Catholic Priest and close associate of Stanislas de Guaita and Oswald Wirth. Communications from the spirits were generally received by means of a pendulum suspended by Lady Caithness over a board of letters.

At one seance, Doinel received the following communication:

“I address myself to you because you are my friend, my servant and the prelate of my Albigensian Church. I am exiled from the Pleroma, and it is I whom Valentinus named Sophia-Achamôth. It is I whom Simon Magus called Helene-Ennoia; for I am the Eternal Androgyne. Jesus is the Word of God; I am the Thought of God. One day I shall remount to my Father, but I require aid in this; it requires the supplication of my Brother Jesus to intercede for me. Only the Infinite is able to redeem the Infinite, and only God is able to redeem God. Listen well: The One has brought forth One, then One. And the Three are but One: the Father, the Word and the Thought. Establish my Gnostic Church. The Demiurge will be powerless against it. Receive the Paraclete.”

 

At other seances, the Canon Stephan and one Guilhabert de Castres, Cathar Bishop of Toulouse in the 12th century, who was martyred at Montségur, were contacted. At another seance, in September of 1889, the “Very High Synod of Bishops of the Paraclete,” consisting of 40 Cathar Bishops, manifested and gave their names, which were later checked against records in the National Library and proved to be accurate. The head of the Synod was Guilhabert de Castres, who addressed Doinel and instructed him to reconstitute and teach the gnostic doctrine by founding an Assembly of the Paraclete, to be called the Gnostic Church. Helene-Ennoia was to assist him, and they were to be spiritually wedded. The assembly was to be composed of Parfaits and Parfaites, and was to take for its holy book the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John. The church was to be administered by male bishops and female “sophias,” who were to be elected and consecrated according to the Gnostic Rite.

Doinel proclaimed the year 1890 as the beginning of the “Era of the Gnosis Restored.” He assumed the office of Patriarch of the Gnostic Church under the mystic name of Valentin II, in homage to Valentinus, the 5th century founder of the Valentinian school of Gnosticism. He consecrated a number of bishops, all of whom chose a mystic name, which was prefaced by the Greek letter Tau to represent the Greek Tau Cross or the Egyptian Ankh.

Among the first of the bishops and sophias consecrated by Doinel were: Gérard Encausse, also known as “Papus” (1865-1916), as Tau Vincent, Bishop of Toulouse (later in 1890, Doinel joined the Martinist Order of Papus and swiftly became a member of its Supreme Council); Paul Sédir (real name Yvon Le Loup, 1871-1926) as Tau Paul, coadjutor of Toulouse; Lucien Chamuel (real name Lucien Mauchel) as Tau Bardesane, Bishop of La Rochelle and Saintes; Louis-Sophrone Fugairon (b. 1846) as Tau Sophronius, Bishop of Béziers; Albert Jounet (1863-1923) as Tau Théodote, Bishop of Avignon; Marie Chauvel de Chauvigny (1842-1927) as Esclarmonde, Sophia of Varsovie; and Léonce-Eugène Joseph Fabre des Essarts (1848-1917), as Tau Synesius, Bishop of Bordeaux.

The Church consisted of three levels of membership: the high clergy, the low clergy, and the faithful. The high clergy consisted of male/female pairs of bishops and sophias, who were responsible for church administration. They were elected by their congregations and later confirmed in office by formal consecration by the patriarch. The low clergy consisted of pairs of deacons and deaconesses, who acted under the direction of the bishops and sophias, and were responsible for conducting the day-to-day church activities. The Faithful, or lay members of the Church, were referred to as Parfaits (male) and Parfaites (female), designations which translate as “Perfect,” and which derive from Catharism. However, in Doinel’s church, the term “Perfect” was not understood in the Cathar sense as someone who had taken strict vows of asceticism, but was interpreted as including the two higher divisions of the Valentinian threefold classification of the human race: the Pneumatics and the Psychics; but excluding the lower division, the materialistic Hylics. Only individuals judged to be of high intelligence, refinement and open mind were admitted to Doinel’s Gnostic Church.

Doinel’s Gnostic Church combined the theological doctrines of Simon Magus, Valentinus and Marcus (a later Valentinian noted for his development of the mysteries of numbers and letters and of the “mystic marriage”) with sacraments derived from the Cathar Church and conferred in rituals which were heavily influenced by those of the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, the Gnostic Church was intended to present a system of mystical Masonry.

A Gnostic Mass, called the Fraction du pain or “Breaking of the Bread” was composed. The sacramental liturgy of the Church was completed by the inclusion of two Cathar sacraments, the Consolamentum and the Appareillamentum.

Leo Taxil

In 1881, a young anti-clericalist named Gabriel-Antoine Jogand-Pages was made a Freemason. Within a year, he resigned from Masonry, converted to Catholicism, and began one of the most notorious propaganda campaigns in the history of Occultism. Under the pseudonym of Leo Taxil, Jogand published a number of books and articles in which he “proved” that Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Martinism and other similar organizations were utterly satanic in nature, and posed a dire threat to Christian European civilization. According to Taxil, all such organizations were secretly controlled by the mysterious “Order of the Palladium,” a ruthless, terrible and extremely secretive body within the heart of Freemasonry which worshipped the Devil with inhuman rites and received commands directly from the Prince of Darkness himself. The Palladists were allegedly headed by Albert Pike, Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and a High Priestess named Diana Vaughan. Miss Vaughan, a direct descendant of the 17th century Rosicrucian and Alchemist Thomas Vaughan, had been corresponding with Taxil. Her heart had evidently been softened by one too many child sacrifices, and she had secretly written to Taxil to inquire about how she might be saved. Her correspondence also revealed many shocking secrets of the devilish world of the Masonic Inner Circle: luciferian symbolism contained in seemingly innocent emblems and phrases; gruesome human sacrifices and obscene phallic orgies conducted in hidden chambers of infernal worship carved beneath the Rock of Gibraltar; and terrifying conspiracies for world satanic domination.

Needless to say, Jogand/Taxil’s works became quite popular. They rapidly gained him the notice and smug patronage of the Roman Catholic Church, and he even obtained an official audience with Pope Leo XIII in 1887.

Ultimately, Miss Vaughan, by then world-famous, decided once and for all to renounce Satan and convert to Catholicism. The Church eagerly anticipated her public introduction, which Jogand/Taxil scheduled for April 19, 1897. To a lecture hall filled with Catholic Clergy and Freemasons, Jogand revealed that Diana Vaughan was none other than his secretary, but that there was no point in introducing her, because she had never been a High Priestess of the Palladists. In fact, there had never been an Order of the Palladium. He, Gabriel Jogand, had fabricated the entire story as a monumental joke at the expense of the Church. He had remained a faithful anti-clericalist all along. The Masons present found this revelation intensely amusing. The Catholic clergy present did not. Fortunately for the proprietors of the lecture hall, the police were summoned before a full-scale riot had broken out.

Jogand’s success had been due, primarily, to his journalistic flair and to the credibility he enjoyed as a result of his enormous erudition; however, another significant factor in his success was his shrewd recruitment of a number of strategic, and totally unwitting, collaborators.

Doinel’s Defection

In 1895, Jules Doinel suddenly abdicated as Patriarch of the Gnostic Church, resigned from his Masonic Lodge, and converted to Roman Catholicism. Under the pseudonym “Jean Kostka,” he attacked the Gnostic Church, Masonry and Martinism in a book called Lucifer Unmasked. For the next two years, Doinel collaborated with Taxil in articles denouncing the organizations that were formerly so much a part of his life. “Lucifer Unmasked” itself was probably a collaborative effort; its style betrays Jogand/Taxil’s hand.

Encausse remarked later that Doinel had lacked “the necessary scientific education to explain without trouble the marvels which the invisible world squandered on him.” Therefore, Encausse theorized, Doinel faced a choice between conversion or madness; and, said Encausse, “Let us be thankful that the Patriarch of the Gnosis has chosen the first way.”

Doinel’s defection was a devastating blow to the Gnostic Church, but it managed to survive. Interim control of the Church was assumed by the Synod of Bishops, and at a High Synod in 1896, they elected one of their bishops, Léonce-Eugène Fabre des Essarts, known as Tau Synesius, to succeed Doinel as patriarch.

Fabre des Essarts was a Parisian occultist, a Symbolist poet and a scholar of the Gnosis and Esoteric Christianity. He and another Gnostic Bishop, Louis-Sophrone Fugairon (Tau Sophronius), a physician who was also a scholar of the Cathars and the Knights Templar, entered into a collaborative relationship to continue the development of the Gnostic Church. Together, they began to shift the emphasis of the teachings of the Gnostic Church away from Gnostic theology and towards a more general view of “occult science.”

In 1899, two years after Leo Taxil had exposed his hoax, Doinel began to correspond with Fabre des Essarts. In 1900 he requested reconciliation with the Gnostic Church and readmission as a bishop. As his first act of consecration as Patriarch of the Gnostic Church, Fabre des Essarts reconsecrated his former patriarch as Tau Jules, Bishop of Alet and Mirepoix.

In 1901, Fabre des Essarts consecrated twenty-year old Jean “Joanny” Bricaud (1881-1934) as Tau Johannes, Bishop of Lyon. Between 1903 and 1910, he consecrated twelve more Gnostic Bishops, including Leon Champrenaud (1870-1925) as Tau Théophane, Bishop of Versailles; René Guenon (1886-1951) as Tau Palingénius, Bishop of Alexandria; and Patrice Genty (1883-1964) as Tau Basilide.

After the death of Fabre des Essarts in 1917, the Patriarchate of the Gnostic Church was assumed by Léon Champrenaud (Tau Théophane). Champrenaud was succeeded by Patrice Genty (Tau Basilide) in 1921, who put l’Église Gnostique de France to rest in 1926 in favor of Jean Bricaud’s Église Gnostique Universelle.

l’Église Catholique Gnostique

Jean Bricaud, Tau Johannes, had been educated in a Roman Catholic seminary, where he had studied for the priesthood, but he renounced his conventional religious pursuits at the age of 16 to pursue mystical occultism. He became involved with the “Eliate Church of Carmel” and the “Work of Mercy” founded in 1839 by Eugéne Vintras (1807-1875); and the “Johannite Church of Primitive Christians,” founded in 1803 by the Templar revivalist Bernard-Raymond Fabré -Palaprat (1777-1838). He had met Encausse in 1899 and had already joined his Martinist Order.

In 1907, with the encouragement (if not direct pressure) of Encausse, Bricaud broke from Fabre des Essarts to found his own schismatic branch of the Gnostic Church. Fugairon decided to join Bricaud. The primary motive for this schism seems to have been the desire to create a branch of the Gnostic Church whose structure and doctrine would more closely parallel those of the Roman Catholic Church rather than those of the Cathar Church (for instance, it included an Order of Priesthood and baptism with water); and which would be more closely tied to the Martinist Order. Doinel had been a Martinist, Bricaud was a Martinist, but Fabre des Essarts was not. Bricaud, Fugairon and Encausse at first tentatively named their branch of the church l’Église Catholique Gnostique (the Gnostic Catholic Church). It was announced as being a fusion of the three existing “gnostic” churches of France: Doinel’s Gnostic Church, Vintras’s Carmelite Church, and Fabré -Palaprat’s Johannite Church. In February of 1908, the episcopal synod of the Gnostic Catholic Church met again and elected Bricaud its patriarch as Tau Jean II. After 1907, in order to clearly distinguish the two branches of the Gnostic church, l’Église Gnostique of Fabre des Essarts became generally known as l’Église Gnostique de France.

The 1908 Paris Conference

On June 24, 1908, Encausse organized an “International Masonic and Spiritualist Conference” in Paris, at which he received, for no money, a patent from Theodor Reuss (Merlin Peregrinus, 1855-1923), head of O.T.O., to establish a “Supreme Grand Council General of the Unified Rites of Antient and Primitive Masonry for the Grand Orient of France and its Dependencies at Paris.” In the same year, the name of l’Église Catholique Gnostique was changed to l’Église Gnostique Universelle (the Universal Gnostic Church).

About four years later, two important documents were published: the Manifesto of the M:.M:.M:. (The M:.M:.M:. was the British Section of O.T.O.), which included the “Gnostic Catholic Church” in the list of organizations whose “wisdom and knowledge” are concentrated in O.T.O.; and the “Jubilee Edition” of The Oriflamme, the official organ of the Reuss O.T.O., which announced that l’Initiation, Encausse’s journal, was the “Official Organ of the Memphis and Mizraim Rites and the O.T.O. in France,” with Encausse listed as the publisher.

The precise details of the transactions of the 1908 Paris conference are unknown, but based on the course of subsequent events, the logical conclusion is that Encausse and Reuss engaged in a fraternal exchange of authority: Reuss receiving episcopal and primatial authority in l’Église Catholique Gnostique and Encausse receiving authority in the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim. For his German branch of the Church, Reuss translated l’Église Catholique Gnostique into German as Die Gnostische Katholische Kirche (G.K.K.); while Encausse, Fugairon and Bricaud changed the name of their French branch of the Church to l’Église Gnostique Universelle (E.G.U.), with Bricaud as patriarch. As with all of his other organizational acquisitions, Reuss included the G.K.K. under the umbrella of O.T.O. For their part, Bricaud, Fugairon and Encausse declared the E.G.U. to be the official church of Martinism in 1911.

The E.G.U. and the Antioch Succession

After assuming the Patriarchate of the Universal Gnostic Church, Bricaud became friendly with Bishop Louis-Marie-François Giraud (Mgr. François, d. 1951), an ex-Trappist Monk who traced his episcopal succession to Joseph René Vilatte (Mar Timotheos, 1854-1929). Vilatte was a Parisian who had emigrated to America early in life. He was a lifelong religious enthusiast, but he was unable to find fulfillment within the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church; so, in America, he began a quest for a religious environment more congenial to his personality and ambitions. He wandered from sect to sect, serving for a time as a Congregationalist minister, later being ordained to the priesthood within the schismatic “Old Catholic” sect. He ultimately obtained episcopal consecration in 1892 at the hands of Bishop Antonio Francisco-Xavier Alvarez (Mar Julius I), Bishop of the Syrian Jacobite Orthodox Church and Metropolitan of the Independent Catholic Church of Ceylon, Goa and India, who had in turn received consecration from Ignatius Peter III, “Peter the Humble,” Jacobite Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch. Vilatte consecrated Paolo Miraglia-Gulotti in 1900; Gulotti consecrated Jules Houssaye (or Hussay, 1844-1912) in 1904, Houssaye consecrated Louis-Marie-François Giraud in 1911; and Giraud consecrated Jean Bricaud on July 21, 1913.

This consecration was important for Bricaud’s church because it provided a valid and documented apostolic episcopal succession, which was recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as valid but “illicit” (i.e., spiritually efficacious, but unsanctioned and contrary to Church policy). The apostolic succession was also widely perceived as reflecting a transmission of true spiritual authority in the Christian current extending as far back as Saint Peter; and even further to Melchizedek, the semi-mythical priest-king of Salem who served as priest to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham. It provided Bricaud and his successors with the apostolic authority to administer the Christian sacraments; which was important because many of the members of the Martinist Order were of the Catholic faith, but as members of a secret society, were subject to excommunication if their Martinist affiliation became known. The E.G.U. thus offered continued assurance of salvation to Catholic Christians who were Martinists or who wished to become Martinists.

After Encausse’s death in 1916, the Martinist Order, and the French sections of the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim and the O.T.O. were briefly headed by Charles Henri Détré (Teder). Détré died in 1918 and was succeeded by Bricaud.

On May 15, 1918, Bricaud consecrated Victor Blanchard (Tau Targelius) who had been secretary to Encausse and Détré. On September 18, 1919, Bricaud reconsecrated Theodor Reuss sub conditione (this term refers to a consecration which is intended to remedy some “defect” of a previous consecration), thereby endowing him with the Antioch succession, and appointed him “Gnostic Legate” of the E.G.U. to Switzerland.

Disagreements soon erupted between Bricaud and Blanchard over leadership of the Martinist Order, which developed into a violent mutual hostility. Blanchard eventually broke with Bricaud to form his own schismatic Martinist Order, which was to be known as the “Martinist and Synarchic Order.” Blanchard’s branch later participated in the formation of an “ecumenical council” of occult rites known by the initials F.U.D.O.S.I., from which H. Spencer Lewis’s A.M.O.R.C. drew much of its authority. In turn, Bricaud’s branch, under his successor Constant Chevillon, joined with R. Swinburne Clymer, Lewis’s Rosicrucian adversary, to form a rival council called F.U.D.O.F.S.I.

Blanchard went on to consecrate at least five other Gnostic Bishops under his own authority, including Charles Arthur Horwath, who later reconsecrated, sub conditione, Patrice Genty (Tau Basilide), the last patriarch of l’Église Gnostique de France, who had previously been consecrated in Doinel’s spiritual succession by Fabre des Essarts; and Roger Ménard (Tau Eon II), who then consecrated Robert Ambelain (Tau Robert) in 1946. Ambelain proceeded to found his own Gnostic Church, l’Église Gnostique Apostolique, in 1953, the year of Blanchard’s death. Ambelain consecrated at least 10 Gnostic Bishops within l’Église Gnostique Apostolique, including Pedro Freire (Tau Pierre), Primate of Brazil; Andre Mauer (Tau Andreas), Primate of Franche-Comte; and Roger Pommery (Tau Jean), Titular Bishop of Macheronte.

Bricaud died on Feb. 21, 1934, and was succeeded as Patriarch of the E.G.U. and as Grand Master of the Martinist Order by Constant Chevillon (Tau Harmonius). Chevillon was consecrated by Giraud in 1936, and he subsequently consecrated a number of bishops himself, including R. Swinburne Clymer in 1938 and Arnold Krumm-Heller (founder of the Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua and Reuss’s O.T.O. representative for South America) in 1939. During World War II, the Vichy puppet government of occupied France banned all secret societies, and on April 15, 1942, the E.G.U. was officially dissolved by the government. On March 22, 1944, Chevillon was brutally assassinated by soldiers of Klaus Barbie’s occupation forces.

The E.G.U. was revived after the war; and in 1945 Tau Renatus was elected as the successor to the martyred Chevillon. Renatus was succeeded in 1948 by Charles-Henry Dupont (Tau Charles-Henry), who stepped down in 1960 in favor of Robert Ambelain (Tau Jean III), who had achieved considerable prominence through his writings. Ambelain finally put l’Église Gnostique Universelle to rest in favor of his own Église Gnostique Apostolique.

Tau Jean III was succeeded as patriarch of l’Église Gnostique Apostolique by André Mauer (Tau Andreas) in 1969, who was succeeded by Pedro Freire (Tau Pierre), primate of South America, in 1970. The same year, Freire had been reconsecrated as Mar Petrus-Johannes XIII, patriarch of l’Église Gnostique Catholique Apostolique, by Dom Antidio Vargas of the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church (Note 2). On his death in 1978, Freire was succeeded by Edmond Fieschi (Tau Sialul I), who abdicated as patriarch in favor of his coadjutor Fermin Vale-Amesti (Tau Valentinus III), who declined to accept the office; effectively putting l’Église Gnostique Apostolique as well as l’Église Gnostique Catholique Apostolique to rest as international organizations. A North American autocephalous branch of l’Église Gnostique Catholique Apostolique survived under the leadership of Primate Roger Saint-Victor Hérard (Tau Charles), who consecrated a number of bishops but died in 1989 without appointing a successor. Several of Hérard’s bishops are still active in the U.S.

The G.K.K. and the E.G.C.

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) joined Reuss’s O.T.O. as a VII° in 1910 (at the time, any 33 Scottish Rite Mason could join O.T.O. at the VII° level). On June 1, 1912, Crowley received from Reuss the IX° and his appointment as National Grand Master X° for Ireland, Iona, and all the Britains (the British Section of O.T.O. was called Mysteria Mystica Maxima, or M:.M:.M:.), taking the name “Baphomet” as his magical title. The next year, he published the Manifesto of the M:.M:.M:., which includes the “Gnostic Catholic Church” in the list of organizations whose “wisdom and knowledge” are concentrated in O.T.O.

Crowley also wrote Liber XV, the Gnostic Mass, in 1913. Liber XV was first published in 1918 in The International, then again in 1919 in The Equinox, Vol. III, No. 1 (the “Blue Equinox”), finally in 1929/30 in Appendix VI of Magick in Theory and Practice. The Latin name Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (E.G.C.) was coined by Crowley in 1913 when he wrote Liber XV.

In Chapter 73 of Crowley’s Confessions, he states that he wrote the Gnostic Mass as the “Ritual of the Gnostic Catholic Church,” which he prepared “for the use of the O.T.O., the central ceremony of its public and private celebration, corresponding to the Mass of the Roman Catholic Church.” It is evident that Crowley viewed the Gnostic Catholic Church and the O.T.O. as inseparable; particularly with respect to the IX° of O.T.O., into which Crowley had been initiated the year before he wrote the Gnostic Mass, and which is termed the “Sovereign Sanctuary of the Gnosis.”

In 1918, Reuss translated Crowley’s Gnostic Mass into German, making a number of editorial modifications, and published it under the auspices of O.T.O. In his publication of the Gnostic Mass, Reuss listed Bricaud as the Sovereign Patriarch of l’Église Gnostique Universelle, and himself as both the Gnostic Legate to Switzerland for l’Église Gnostique Universelle, and as the Sovereign Patriarch and Primate of Die Gnostische Katholische Kirche, a title which he may have received at the 1908 Paris conference.

Crowley’s Gnostic Mass, despite its many structural similarities to the Mass of the Roman Catholic Church, is expressly a Thelemic ritual rather than a Christian one. Reuss’s translation preserved the essentially Thelemic/Gnostic character of the ritual, although it indicates that Reuss’s understanding of Thelema diverged somewhat from Crowley’s. Reuss’s publication of the Gnostic Mass was a significant event for two reasons: it represented the declaration of independence of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica from Église Gnostique Universelle, and it represented the church’s formal acceptance of the Law of Thelema at the highest level.

The Modern E.G.C.

After Reuss, the succession to leadership of the Thelemic Gnostic Catholic Church within O.T.O. passed to his successor as Outer Head of the Order (O.H.O.), Aleister Crowley, whose accession in 1922 restored the original version of the Gnostic Mass. Crowley appears to have celebrated the Gnostic Mass a number of times at his Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily. He also made an audio recording of the Gnostic Mass some time during the 1930s, with a singer named Dolores Sillarno singing the lines of the priestess, but only portions of this recording seem to have survived.

It is unclear whether Charles Stansfeld Jones (1886-1950), who served as Grand Master X° for North America under both Reuss and Crowley, ever celebrated the Gnostic Mass as part of his O.T.O. activities. However, one of the members of his Agapé Lodge in Vancouver, British Columbia was a man named Wilfred T. Smith (1887-1957). Smith moved to Southern California in the 1920s, and in 1930, began to assemble an O.T.O. working group in Hollywood. This group began to celebrate the Gnostic Mass on a weekly basis in 1933; and in 1935 the group was chartered as Agapé Lodge (the second O.T.O. Lodge of that name). The next year, Crowley appointed Smith as National Grand Master General X° for the United States. The Gnostic Mass was celebrated every Sunday evening at Agapé Lodge by Smith and priestess Regina Kahl (1891-1945) from 1933 until 1942, when the Lodge moved to a new facility in Pasadena, California (Note 3). Jane Wolfe (1875-1958), who had studied with Crowley personally during the 1920s in Cefalù, assisted Smith and Kahl in developing a standard of performance for the Gnostic Mass, and frequently served as deacon in the ceremony.

Crowley died in 1947, and was succeeded as O.H.O. by Karl Germer (Saturnus, 1885-1962). During Germer’s tenure as O.H.O., the only group regularly celebrating the Gnostic Mass was the Swiss O.T.O. under Hermann Metzger (1919-1990), which began celebrating the Gnostic Mass in the 1950s at its temple in Stein. Germer died in 1962, without naming a successor. The O.T.O. was dormant in the U.S. from 1962 until 1969, when Grady McMurtry (Hymenaeus Alpha, 1918-1985), the last ranking officer of O.T.O. International Headquarters remaining active, exercised emergency powers granted to him in the 1940s by Crowley and acceded to the office of Caliph and O.H.O. of O.T.O. In July of 1977, Hymenaeus Alpha and the members of the newly-revived O.T.O. formally celebrated the Gnostic Mass– the first time in the U.S. since the days of Agapé Lodge.

Unlike the other organizations encompassed by O.T.O., E.G.C. has its own published ritual which could be practiced outside the context of the O.T.O. initiation structure. The Gnostic Mass has its own officers. Although the ritual calls for them to make use of the signs of various O.T.O. degrees, the officers do not have an immediately obvious correlation with O.T.O. degrees. Liber XV also refers to the administration of other sacramental rites such as baptisms, confirmations, marriages and the ordination of clergy. The E.G.C. could, theoretically, operate independently of O.T.O. In 1979, under Hymenaeus Alpha, a non-profit religious corporation independent of O.T.O. was established under the name “Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica.” This was a well-intentioned but short-lived attempt to spread Thelema to a broader audience than it was believed O.T.O. was able to do. The E.G.C. developed its own policies and procedures for baptisms, confirmations and ordinations (which are alluded to in Liber XV), and its own hierarchy of bishops, priests, priestesses, exorcists, novices and deacons– largely based on the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. Between Fall 1984 and Fall 1985, the independent E.G.C. produced four numbers of a publication called Ecclesia Gnostica.

Grady McMurtry died in 1985, and in accordance with his wishes, his successor was elected by vote of the Sovereign Sanctuary of the Gnosis, the IX° membership of the O.T.O. His successor took the magical title Hymenaeus Beta. When Hymenaeus Beta took office, he perceived that the divergence of the paths of E.G.C. and O.T.O. would ultimately be unhealthy for the development of Thelema. The O.T.O. required the focus and open social structure provided by the regular celebration of the Gnostic Mass, and the E.G.C. required the perspective and esoteric teachings of the O.T.O. initiatory system. Hymenaeus Beta dissolved the E.G.C. corporation in 1985, and in 1987, reintegrated the E.G.C. into the O.T.O. by incorporating provisions in the O.T.O. Bylaws specifying that there was to be a class of O.T.O. membership called “Ecclesiastical Membership,” which would consist of the bishops of the E.G.C. Since it was believed at the time that cells of the “Gnostic Catholic Church” existed outside O.T.O., provisions were included in the Bylaws which permitted the bishops of such branches to affiliate with O.T.O. as Ecclesiastical Members upon mutual recognition (Note 4).

The Ecclesiastical Members were allowed to exercise their “traditional” episcopal powers with little interference. The new E.G.C., consisting of the Ecclesiastical Membership of O.T.O., published four numbers of a newsletter called Gnostic Gnews between December 1988 and September 1989.

When the E.G.C. converted from Christianity to Thelema, it ceased to be an institution dedicated to the administration of Christian sacraments. Therefore, a valid Christian apostolic succession was no longer of critical relevance. The traditional apostolic succession may be of some interest and value within the Thelemic E.G.C. as an aspect of the traditions inherited from the pre-Thelemic French Gnostic Church, and as a form of symbolic successorship to the great Christian, Hebraic and Pagan religious systems of the past. However, for a church which purports to represent the Thelemic religion, an “apostolic” or sacerdotal succession from the Prophet of Thelema is far more relevant, in a purely spiritual and theological sense, than a succession from the apostles of the “Pale Galilean.”

However, it was commonly held within the E.G.C. under Hymenaeus Alpha, and for a time under Hymenaeus Beta as well, that a valid traditional apostolic succession would increase the prestige of the E.G.C. and help it to achieve recognition from the civil authorities. Attempts were made to demonstrate that Crowley himself possessed a valid Christian apostolic succession in the Vilatte line through Theodor Reuss (he almost certainly did not), and further attempts were made to strengthen the traditional apostolic succession within E.G.C. by bringing in additional lines of succession from outside sources. Some O.T.O. members were recognized as E.G.C. bishops after receiving consecration from bishops outside the E.G.C.; and certain bishops of other branches of the Gnostic Church were recognized as Ecclesiastical Members of O.T.O. A number of articles on the various putative lines of traditional apostolic succession within E.G.C. were published in the Gnostic Gnews.

Unfortunately, the emphasis on the apostolic succession and the semi-autonomy of the bishops resulted in an erosion of central control. It came to be widely believed that the traditional apostolic succession, which could be passed from one individual to another by the simple laying on of hands, was sufficient to become an E.G.C. bishop. The practical function of the bishops as church administrators and overseers of the rites was becoming overshadowed by the mystique of the apostolic succession; and a number of unqualified individuals were consecrated as “bishops” without the requisite notification or preparation. Then, synchronistically, outside criticism began to raise serious doubts about the technical validity of the traditional apostolic succession current in the E.G.C. Also, with Ecclesiastical Membership limited to bishops, the role of the priests, priestesses and deacons as visible representatives of the E.G.C. was undervalued. A number of priests and priestesses were ordained without so much as having ever attended a Gnostic Mass. The church had reached a crisis of identity; and a fundamental reassessment of its structure, its relationship with O.T.O., the roles of its officers, and the relevance of the traditional apostolic succession and other such residual, pre-Thelemic institutions was in order.

In the Fall of 1990, Hymenaeus Beta suspended the consecration of bishops within E.G.C. until policies could be developed which would establish formal qualifications for Ecclesiastical Membership. This was accomplished in the Fall of 1991 by the adoption of a policy which expanded the definition of Ecclesiastical Membership to include priests, priestesses and deacons, and which required ordained officers of E.G.C. to be initiated members of specified rank within O.T.O. before they would be formally recognized as such by O.T.O. Deacons were required to be at least I° members of O.T.O. and thus full members of the Order; priests and priestesses were required to be initiates of the degree of K.E.W. (which falls between IV° and V°), the first degree in the O.T.O. series to which admission is by invitation only; and bishops were required to be of at least the VII°, which gives them the power to initiate to the K.E.W. degree and thus to ordain priests and priestesses.

In 1993, an outline of a Thelemic baptism ritual, written by Aleister Crowley, was discovered, and has been incorporated into the E.G.C. system. As the liturgical and ministerial wing of Ordo Templi Orientis, the Gnostic Catholic Church continues to develop and evolve with the growth of its membership, the creative input of its officers, and the progressive manifestation of the Thelemic-Gnostic egregore. The process has not been without its difficulties, but, to paraphrase Liber Librae, in trials and troubles is Strength, and by their means is a pathway opened unto the Light.

Notes:

1.    This essay was originally published in 1995 in “Mystery of Mystery: a Primer of Thelemic Ecclesiastical Gnosticism,” published by J. Edward and Marlene Cornelius as Number 2 of the private Thelemic journal Red Flame.
Several minor errors have been corrected since publication in the Red Flame; notably the following:
– Reuss’s translation of the Gnostic Mass was published in 1918 rather than 1920; and
– the document published about four years after the 1908 Paris Conference was the Manifesto of the M:.M:.M:. rather than the Manifesto of the O.T.O.

2.    The Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church was founded in 1945 by Mgr. Carlos Duarte Costa, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Botacatu, who was excommunicated by the Holy See for having criticized Pope Pius XII for blessing Nazi and Fascist troops in St. Peter’s Square in 1943.(Return)

3.    A rumor was once circulated to the effect that the Gnostic Mass as celebrated at Agapé Lodge included explicit sexual conduct. According to surviving members of Agapé Lodge, the rumor was entirely spurious. The text of Liber XV was followed closely, and the priestess always appeared fully clothed.(Return)

4.    The term was later corrected to “Gnostic Church”. The Gnostic Catholic Church officially ceased to exist outside O.T.O. in 1908, when the name of Église Catholique Gnostique was changed to Église Gnostique Universelle. This clause is now used only for the establishment of amicable relations rather than for conferral of actual episcopal authority in E.G.C.(Return)

 

References:

• Anson, Peter F.; Bishops at Large, Faber & Faber, London 1964
• Brandreth, Henry R.T.; Episcopi Vagantes and the Anglican Church, 2nd Edition, S.P.C.K., London 1961
• Bricaud, Jean; Catéchisme Gnostique. A l’usage des fidèles de l’Église Catholique Gnostique, Lyon, 1907
• Bricaud, Jean; l’Histoire de la Gnose, unpublished
• Cammell, Charles Richard; Aleister Crowley: the Man, the Mage, the Poet, University Books, Inc., New Hyde Park, NY 1962
• Clymer, R. Swinburne; The Rosicrucian Fraternity in America, Vol. II, Rosicrucian Foundation, Quakertown, PA
• Cokinis, Robert M. (Tau Charles Harmonius II); “A Historical Brief of the Gnostic Catholic Ecclesia” privately published by Eglise Gnostique Catholique Apostolique, Synode Des Etats Unis D’Amerique Du Nord, Bellwood, Illinois
• Drouet de la Thibauderie d’Erlon, Ivan; Églises et evêques Catholiques non Romains, Dervy-Livres, Paris 1962
• Frick, Karl R.H.; Licht und Finsternis: Gnostisch-theosophische und freimauerisch-okkulte Geheimgesellschaften bis an die Wende zum 20.jahrhundert, Akademische Druck- U. Verlagsanstalt, Graz, Austria, 1975
• Geyraud, Pierre; Sectes & Rites, petites églises, religions nouvelles, sociétés secrètes de Paris, Éditions Émile-Paul Frères, 1954
• Gilbert, R.A.; “Baphomet & Son” in Spectrum, No. 5
• Goodrich, Norma Lorre; The Holy Grail, Harper Collins, New York 1992
• Harper, C.; “The Mathew Succession in the E.G.C.” in Gnostic Gnews, Vol. I, No. 4, Autumnal Equinox 1989
• Heidrick, William E.; “What is the Gnostic Catholic Church?” in Gnostic Gnews, Vol. I, No. 2, Spring Equinox 1989
• Hérard, Roger Saint-Victor (Tau Charles); “Universal Apostolic Autocephalous Gnostic Church of North America” privately published, Chicago, 1979.
• Howe, Ellic; “Theodor Reuss: Irregular Freemasonry in Germany, 1900-23” in Ars Quatuor Coronati, Feb. 1978
• Hymenaeus Beta, “On the Gnostic Catholic Church” in The Magical Link, Vol. III, No. 4, Winter 1990
• König, P.R.; “Das O.T.O.-Phänomenon 12: Die Wandernden Bischöfe” in AbraHadAbra, Nov 1991
• Le Forestier, René; L’Occultisme en France aux XIXème et XXème siècles: L’Église Gnostique, Ouvrage inédit publié par Antoine Faivre, Archè, Milano 1990
• McIntosh, Christopher; Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival, Rider & Co., London 1972
• Merlin Peregrinus (Theodor Reuss); I.N.R.I., O.T.O., Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae, Canon Missae, Der Gnostische Messe, privately published by the Oriflamme 1918, translated by Marcus M. Jungkurth 1991
• Merlin Peregrinus (Theodor Reuss); “Unser Orden” and “Mysteria Mystica Maxima” in Oriflamme, Jubelaeums-Ausgabe, Ludwigshafen 1912
• Möller, Helmut und Ellic Howe; Merlin Peregrinus, vom Untergrund des Abendlandes, Koenigshausen & Neumann, Würtzburg 1986
• Rhodes, Henry T.F.; The Satanic Mass, The Citadel Press, Secaucus, NJ 1954/1974
• Seckler, Phyllis; “Jane Wolfe: The Sword – Hollywood” in In the Continuum, Vol. III, No. 4, College of Thelema, Oroville California 1983
• Tau Dionysus; “Gnostics and Templars” in Gnostic Gnews, Vol. I, No. 3, Summer Solstice 1989
• Tau Sir Hasirim; “The Gnostic Catholic Church”, in Gnostic Gnews, Vol. I, No. 3, Summer Solstice 1989
• Waite, Arthur Edward; Devil-Worship in France, George Redway, London 1896
• Webb, James; The Occult Establishment, Library Press, LaSalle, Illinois 1976
• Webb, James; The Occult Underground, Library Press, LaSalle, Illinois 1974

 

Loving History–Parzifal

 

Stratford+ Extracts

Several Extracts from Jordan Stratford’s+ Blog about Definition

10 Steps Toward a Gnostic Communion: A Call for Dialogue

Jordan Stratford+ (from his Blog, April 10, 2005)

 

It seems to me that the Gnostic Restoration since 1890 has been largely characterized by personality rather than theology. We desperately need a dialogue among the vital contributors of the Restoration: the big G Gnostics, the Theosophists, the Thomasine, Johannite and Primitive Christians, the Thelemites, the Liberal Catholics, the Jungians, the SAW people, the Masons, everybody with a stake and voice.

I would like to offer this analysis as an acting spine of Ecclesiastical Gnosticism through which we may move forward as a greater community.

What is a Gnostic Communion? It would seem that each gathering and Eucharist would be open and flexible enough to recognize that we each to come to gnosis through our own, unique path, and that we each have a point. The points below are not a suggestion of or for orthodoxy, but rather as explorations for common ground, and starting points for a sound debate. What I hope to see in the next decade is something greater than a concordat between Latin Johannites and Haitian Thelemites – but a respecting of territorial Bishops, a sharing of resources, the continued exchange of successions, and a more accessible Ekklesia. Okay and maybe a seminary.

To my mind, a Gnostic Communion would hold to:

1) A superrational, supernatural, superpersonal Divinity

The Big, BIG God model. I subscribe to the idea that any idea of God we can conceive rationally is a kind of idolatry. As Gnostics, we *must* have direct, firsthand experience of how Divinity relates to each of us before we can move forward and share our ideas with the world. This experience *cannot* be academic, or safely contained in language. God is not Yahweh or Osiris or Gaia; each of these are crude caricatures of God. The Pleroma can be Known, but cannot be grasped.

2) The idea of agency and and personal responsibility

a) Tag, you’re it. The Kingdom of God is within you. The Logos is not getting off a plane or manifesting as anybody you’ll see on CNN. Christ is something that happens to you, the anointing of the spark of Divinity within, and giving THAT authority over your life.

b) Gnosticism is NOT initiatory in the traditional sense. I cannot conduct a ritual making you a Gnostic and imparting the secret wisdom of the Gnostics. You have the exclusive ability and obligation to Gnosticize yourself. There are forces at work in the world to prevent this, but there are also forces in the world to enable it.

c) It’s obvious that the agents of the Archons are everywhere – but less obvious about the signals we receive from the Divine. Sophia is everywhere – everywhere, sometimes within the mechanism of the Archons themselves.

3) Ownership of terms (gnosis, pleroma, pneuma, logos)

We really need a strong, solid language as a starting point, and we need to sign off on these terms. What do we mean by Pleroma? I would love to see not just a lexicon (there are a few out there) but a real theological examination of these words in a Gnostic context.

4) Distinction between Ecclesiastical Gnosticism and philosophical “small-g” gnosticism, and a rejection of the idea of neo-gnosticism

Neo-gnosticism means anything a critic wants it to. The term is meaningless, meant to be mildly insulting, and we need to banish it from the radar. If we see an article employing the term, we need to be contacting the authors and asking them to clarify. Gnosis is the birthright of all humanity. GnosticISM is a religion for a few that at its core honours the experience of gnosis.

5) Recognition of our pre-Christian roots

Gnosticism is not an heretical branch of Christianity. We need a critical, objective look our history, its nature and syncretism – and then to be more proactive and less retroactive. What of our pre-Christian roots needs to survive? What needs to be put in the attic?

6) Rejection of literalism (esp. literalist dualism) , fundamentalism, and historical revisionism through iconoclasm, wit, humour, and joy

To my mind the single worst thing that could happen is the development of a Gnostic Fundamentalism, or a claim that Thomas (apostle and/or brother of Jesus) actually wrote Thomas, or that the events of Poimandres happened on a certain Wednesday in Damascus. We cannot be “about” dusty old codices from a jar, but rather a living, breathing religion that asks questions about domestic violence, about poverty, about media and democracy. We must fervently renounce the slanderous label of dualism, and point to how lovingly Gnostic scripture refers to natural forces. We reject the system, not the earth.

7) Communication of our rich cultural heritage

No, The Matrix doesn’t count. We need to read Blake, sponsor a tour of Roerich, publish tranlations of Soloviev. Actually we need a Blake Year.

“Valentinus, Basilides and the Logos walk into a bar…” – why are there no Gnostic jokes?

8) Centralize the purpose of Eucharist in our practice, not the form

Who will be the first to declare their liturgy Open Source? How about a core structure of the Mass, with a more modular approach? Insert your creed here. Regardless, we need stronger, more coherent Gnostic RE to explain what’s going on up there with the little white crackers.

9) Ecumenism, not proselytization

a) No more schisms. Please. Enough with all the schisming. Our tradition holds for independent Bishops – we don’t need a new set of incorporation documents and logos and websites with every ordination.

b) The model is not that of an hierarchical Church, but a non-resident monastery. Clergy serves those who have chosen to show up, by listening, counselling, teaching and cheerleading.

c) Unlike many religious communities in the West, we are growing. Others are disappearing. We need to build a bridge to lapsed Catholics, the Liberal Catholic Tradition, and to Reform Judaism. The latter has a lot to teach us about encoded wisdom, and surviving as a minority religion.

10) Praxis and Caritas

What do we DO, exactly, other than read and pray and argue on listservs? Each Parish needs to dedicate itself to social action by adopting one or two local, on the ground charities. It’s not enough to donate a copy of The Jesus Mysteries to your local library – that’s self-serving. I mean hot meals to elderly shut ins, the animal shelter, clean socks to the homeless. Tithe. Hours if not money. Make it a condition for membership. Nobody does a better job of this than Bishop del Campo’s folks, and they are to be lauded.

There are few enough of us to build rapid consensus and to sign off on something like this in the next ten years.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

10 Things Religious Pundits Need To Know About Gnosticism

“We don’t need to take the Gospel of Judas / Thomas / Mary seriously, because unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it wasn’t written in the first century, wasn’t written by eyewitnesses and is not historically true. It was written by an elitist world-hating sect called the Gnostics who were rejected by early Christians as heretics. Gnostics preached that the flesh was evil, and salvation was only available to a select few who had secret magical knowledge, or gnosis.”

– Every bible “expert” in the western world in the last three weeks.

 

 

I’ve read variations on this spiel at least twenty times this month. The problem is that this summation of Gnosticism is entirely false, and in many cases known by its proponents as false; this is bearing false witness.

1) Gnosticism is not a heretical sect of Christianity

Gnosticism is a distinct, pre-Christian religion. Its roots are in Alexandria in Egypt, about 2200 years ago, where a “café-society” of Greek-speaking and -educated Jews were syncretizing the myths of the ancient world with Judaism and classical Greek philosophy.

These communities and their ideas greatly influenced Christianity as it later emerged. As Christianity struggled in its first four centuries to distinguish itself from the pagan world, it slowly began to reject some of these Gnostic influences. But most of the people who still favoured these ideas considered themselves devout Christians, not heretics.

Let us not forget that the most common topic in the New Testament – more common than the power of love or redemption or the sacrfice of the cross or even the divinity of Jesus – is that “other Christians are getting it wrong”. Paul condemns James as a heretic. Jesus refers to Peter as “Satan”.

2) Gnosticism is a lot like Buddhism

Because of Gnosticism’s insistence on personal responsibility and ethics, its emphasis on singular prayer, the practice of compassion, detachment from materialism and the striving for enlightenment, it has been called “the Buddhism of the West”. The similarities between Gnosticism and Mahayana Buddhism are so strong it has been speculated that there may have been ongoing contact between the two religions.

3) The Gnostic Scriptures are, for the most part, contemporary with Christian canon

None of the four canonical Gospels were written in the first century. Mark was not written by Mark, nor Luke written by Luke. John was written in two distinct phases, the first of which showed significant Gnostic elements, and the latter a retraction and condemnation of those elements. These were based on first century oral traditions which varied greatly from region to region, but did not exist in written form until at least 100 years after the events they describe. Paul is the only first century Christian writer we have, and much of his writings were edited centuries later into the form we have today.

The Gospel of Thomas, for example, is contemporary with the later half of John, and there is some evidence to support that John‘s later editors were familiar with Thomas. The scriptural authors of the second century were reaching for meaning, using their interpretation what they had heard, their intuition, their creativity, and their yearning for G@d.

4) Gnostics do not hate the physical world

Gnostic scripture frequently invokes favourably the beauty and power of the natural world; the symbolism of pregnancy, midwifery, childbirth, newborns, storms and ripe crops are frequently employed by Gnostic authors. Gnostics do not view the flesh as evil, but rather as temporary when contrasted with the immortality of the soul – a view shared by most if not all Christians.

What Gnostics reject is not the earth, but they system: the artificial world of injustice, prejudice, institutionalization and materialism.

5) Gnostics do not repudiate salvation through Grace

The role of Grace, and of the Holy Spirit, is of paramount importance to the Gnostics. Where Gnosticism differs from Christianity is that Gnosticism says that “blind faith” does not grant salvation. To be saved from the forces of deception and ignorance (maya in Buddhist parlance) one must attain enlightenment: the direct experiential intimacy with G@d that is gnosis. This experience is the birthright of every aware human person.

6) Gnosticism is not elitist

Do Christians distinguish between the saved and the unsaved? Is this elitism? Gnostic teachings frequently reinforce the idea that liberation via gnosis is available to everyone; that such distinction is a matter of reclaiming birthright, of intent, choice, and effort. In fact, Gnostic theology tends to support the idea of apokatastasis, of universal salvation.

7) Gnosticism is not Utopian.

There is nothing in Gnostic scripture to support the idea that Gnostics wish to make “heaven on earth” from human efforts, and no connection whatsoever between Gnosticism and the reshaping of society; neither from fascism nor socialism. There is no “immanentizing the eschaton” in Gnosticism: Rather, this idea is the hallmark of millennialist Christianity.

8) Most basic tenets of Gnosticism are supported by Christian scripture

In fact there is a litany of Christian saints who are blatantly Gnostic; St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Hildegard of Bingen and St. Joan of Arc all described in detail the integrity of their experience of gnosis.

Paul says “The Kingdom of G@d is within you” which is probably the best single summation of Gnostic theology. Jesus says “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18:36).

9) Gnosticism serves as a bridge between world religions

Gnosticism stands at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, representing a common ground. Historically Gnosticism influenced Judaism in the development of Kabala, and Islam in the development of Sufism; it both encouraged and challenged Christianity through its early centuries and contributed profoundly to Christian theology and identity.

10) Gnostic churches are thriving

Gnostics across North America and Europe gather weekly for prayer and Eucharist in forms very similar to orthodox liturgy. We derive inspiration from the Old and New Testaments, and also from Nag Hammadi scripture such as The Gospel of Thomas and The Thunder: Perfect Mind. A vital and growing Gnostic ekklesia is serving in charities, missions and hospitals; writing, crafting, debating and working in coffeehouses and dozens of parishes around the world. Most Gnostics consider themselves Christian, their churches constituting the Body of Christ. Other Gnostics gravitate to the symbolism and traditions of the Divine Feminine in her aspect as Sophia (“wisdom”), the Shekhina (“presence”), and the Holy Spirit.

Despite book-burnings, despite the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition, despite schlock-populism, and despite inane castigations from self-appointed pundits, we are still here; still praying, celebrating, exploring, and asking. Still Knowing.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Gnosticism 101

 

Two thousand years ago, in Northern Egypt, a religious culture existed that embraced early Christianity, Qabalistic Judaism, Roman State Religion, Egyptian Mystery cults, Mithraism, and Greek philosophy. Because this religion emphasized personal revelatory experience and rejected Faith, it was a threat to the conformist orthodoxy which was taking shape in the Christian Church. Gnosticism’s adherents were first ostracized, then persecuted, then slaughtered. But Gnosticism’s ideas speak to a basic truth, and Gnosticism itself resurfaced countless times in the intervening centuries.

– In the beginning, there is only the Pleroma (the “empty fullness”), a state of infinite potential, unity, nothingness, and totality. For the Gnostic, this is God – without gender, personality, or human characteristics. The Pleroma is the Primal Source, and every universe, and the potential for every universe, is an emanation of the Pleroma.

– At some point, the Pleroma conceives of the “something” as opposed to “nothing”. There is a sudden and significant division between these two poles, a fundamental one and zero. As yin and yang, positive and negative, male and female – all Diads are a reflection of these two “magnetic poles of God”.

– These two poles, yearning for the unity of the pre-existing Pleroma, again come together. The result of that union is a daughter, Sophia (“Wisdom”). Sophia is as close as a Gnostic comes to ascribing a human personality to God.

– In one myth, Sophia, jealous of Her parents ability to create, creates in turn Her own children. These children, however, do not contain the spark of the Divine, as they do not come from the Pleroma.

– These children – known as the Archons, or rulers – are a huge problem. They are in turn jealous of their Mother’s ability to create, and they create an entire universe over which to rule. The set themselves up as gods over their creation, but as they are imperfect their creation is flawed, cruel, and grotesque. This is the universe in which we live, and we are their creatures. It is a caricature of the Real World of union with the Pleroma.

– The early part of human history relates to our imprisonment and the injustice of the created world. A critical part of the Archon’s agenda is to hide the truth of the Pleroma from their pawns. The chief of the Archons, the Demiurge, is particularly megalomaniacal and sadistic. He wants the world to worship him as the one true god.

– Sophia discovers the scheme of the Archons and their creation, and is horrified. She returns to the Pleroma and repents for Her error. She then carries a “spark” of Divinity, slips down through the complex hierarchies of the Archons, and conceals a splinter of God into everything and everyone.

– In some traditions, Sophia incarnates as Eve within the garden. Other stories have Her assume the role of Serpent. When the Demiurge appears before Adam and Eve and declares “There is no God but me”, Sophia reveals Her True Self and states “You are wrong!” and shames Her monstrous offspring.

– Things start to get paranoid here. A small number of the Archons realize their error, and wish to return with Sophia to the Pleroma. She commands that they remain in their creation to act secretly as her agents, and encourage the spark in humanity.

– Christian Gnostics subscribe to the tradition which implies that Sophia is thereafter trapped in the created world and separated from the Pleroma. One aspect of the Pleroma, the Logos (“Word”) is sent down through the Archons to rescue Her. The Logos is incarnated as Jesus, and his mission is to awaken the spark of God among humankind in order to generate a kind of “critical mass” of Divinity. The idea is that this would function as a kind of rocket fuel to return both the Logos and Sophia to the Pleroma. Some traditions state that this was successful, others not.

– Where this leaves us, as Gnostics, is to kindle the inner spark in order to escape the cruelty of the Demiurge and his agents, and light the way home to Divinity. This awakening is called gnosis (“knowledge” – spiritual enlightenment), a first-hand certainty of their relationship with the divine. This also involves a rejection of faith, and of third-party salvation. The Gnostic must personally negotiate with the Archons, and debate, argue, and define the nature of that relationship.

– I’ve never met a Gnostic who feels this is anything other than a metaphor, a powerful and transformative myth. But it does describe an almost universal sense of “this is not the deal”, that the SYSTEM (“kosmos”) of time, decay, disease, ignorance, jealousy, pettiness – does not reflect the “true” world, and that the god in charge of this creation must be cruel, insane, or both.

– Gnostics tend to come in one of three main varieties: Christian (about 70%), Hermetic (about 25%) and Sophianic (5%).

– The main sources for Gnostic thought, written between 200 BCE and 200 CE, were narrowly circulated, and hidden from mainstream or orthodox authorities. A large collection of these texts, the Nag Hammadi library, was unearthed in 1945. Among these is the Christian Gospel of Thomas, believed by many biblical scholars to be the oldest and most accurate account of the real teachings of Jesus.

– Hermetic Gnostics study the writings of the semi-mythical Hermes Trimegistus, an Egyptian priest (actually a nom-de-plume for up to a dozen philosophers over a few centuries). It is the discipline of magic, of alchemy and metaphysics, the “yoga of the west”. The renaissance humanists, the Rosicrucians and early Freemasons were of these.

– Sophian Gnostics hold the idea of the Divine Feminine, inherent in the world and advocating for our enlightenment. She is the Queen of Heaven, Holy Wisdom, the Celestial Bride. Similarly, the Magdalene is also a central figure as an aspect of Sophia, as is the Egyptian goddess Aset, more commonly known as Isis.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Gnosticism 102

The myth from the previous post explains the setup, but it has very little bearing on human experience. What follows is sometimes called “The Gnostic Road”, and relates to the personal process of becoming a Gnostic.

1) Aporia (“roadlessness”). A feeling of disorientation or exclusion from the accepted conventions of the world, and a sense that “this is not the deal”. The certainty that something is wrong with the universe, and creeping paranoia that a) this is not the real world and b) that the forces in charge of this world are hiding something secret, something powerful.

2) Epiphany (“shining above”). The big light bulb over the head, the primal “Aha!” that reveals the glowing spark of divinity in all things. A perception of real and immediate and undeniable TRUTH in art and life and joy and beauty and the sacred real.

3)Agon (“struggle”). This is where things get ugly. The problem is, the Opposition is real, organized, and thoroughly pissed off at your recent epiphany. You’re suddenly a lightning rod for “bad luck” in the form of THE SYSTEM – parking tickets, tax audits, bank charges, mechanical failures, illness, miscommunication. People are “worried about you”. This is where most people either give up and deny their epiphany, or go crazy and talk to themselves on the bus.

The real struggle is in finding equilibrium – knowing what you know, and continuing to live in the world. Rendering unto Caesar. Sitting down with the Archons and negotiating some kind of truce.

4) Gnosis (“knowledge”). Equivalent to the satori of Zen or the nirvana of Hinduism, this is personally-negotiated spiritual enlightenment. A first-hand experience of divinity as real and present. Tag, you’re it.

5) Charis (“grace”). This is Sainthood, the ability to radiate your own gnosis to others, and overcome the limitations imposed on you by the Archons.

Ah, light in the darkness of discernment–Parzifal

 

You Are the Plague

John Lamb Lash wrote this article which is, in fact, an analysis of the first two movies of The Matrix Trilogy.

================================

       

 

“You Are the Plague”

 

With the release of the second film in the Matrix Trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded, the adventures of Neo and Trinity continue to fascinate millions of moviegoers around the world. Spectacular as they are, there is more to the Matrix films than special effects. Various beliefs regarding the human speces are nested into the plot-line, and the way these beliefs play against each other makes these films the subject of endless debate. The Matrix films provide a unique occasion to consider the immense power of electronic media over our minds and lives.

 

In the definitive scene in The Matrix (1999), Agent Smith, a coolly sinister plainclothes entity in the computer-simulated world that is the Matrix, says to Morpheus, leader of the rebel group that has escaped it: “Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet. You are the plague. And we are… the cure.”

 

In this exchange, Agent Smith speaks for what created him: the power of AI, artificial intelligence. In another scene where Morpheus initiates Neo, a new recruit to the rebel team, he says: “Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to AI.” This sentence encapulates the attitude of many technocrats who believe that advanced computer science will produce astounding miracles of a beneficial kind. Confidence in the miraculous possibilities of AI is one of several technocratic beliefs at play in the complex plot of the Matrix trilogy. Morpheus explains to Neo, whom he has extracted from the Matrix, that sometime at the start of the twenty-first century war broke out between the humanity and a race of machines spawned by the advanced technology of AI, itself the product of human minds. Thus humanity, instead of using AI to engineer a new world, has become enslaved to its own invention.

 

In the Matrix trilogy the central conflict is between the mental power of human beings and the mind-mimicing powers of AI. (All quotes are from The Shooting Script: The Matrix Screenplay by Larry and Andy Wachowski, Newmarket Press, New York, 2001.)

 

Man Against Machines

 

Agent Smith, who is not a simulation of an actual human being but a perfect human replica devised by AI, represents the Machines that rebelled against their inventors. (This theme is not new, of course. It plays a central role in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Arthur C. Clarke, in which a superintelligent computer HAL rebels against his makers and hijacks an interplanetary mission.) The Machines themselves are horrible gigantic insects, depicted with erector-set carapaces, octopus-like tentacles and high-tech sensors, who swarm like locusts over the surface of the earth. The planet has been demolished by nuclear war, the atmosphere plunged in perpetual darkness.

 

The vast majority of human beings are no longer born naturally but raised in huge cellular banks of holding tanks where they are harvested by the Machines to whom they supply bioelectrical energy. Each individual body of a living human is comatose, immersed in gooey gel, and gruesomely connected by coaxial cables to an unseen mainframe that simulates a world resembling ordinary urban life in the late twentieth century. Neo, who is the “One” predestined to free humanity from the illusion of living in a real world, must first realize that the world from which he was extracted, and which he took for totally real, is “a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix.”

 

The Matrix was filmed in Sydney, Australia, a city that looks like any other. At first the viewer is unaware that scenes occurring in this setting are not real-world events but simulations. In this perfect replication of ordinary urban life, a message appears on the screen of Neo’s computer telling him, “The Matrix has you.” At the moment we read these words, we the viewers are also caught in the same illusion.

 

The film tricks the viewer, not into believing that the world simulated in the Matrix is real, but into believing that it is possible to wake up within the simulation, as one does in a lucid dream. The heroic quest of Neo consists in realizing, when he is in the Matrix, that he has the power to master it through his own mind. To this end, Morpheus and his team of rebels, who have extracted Neo from the holding, voluntarily return with him to the Matrix so that they can test their human mental powers against the AI that drives the simulation. Many scenes in the film unfold as if the characters were functioning in a video game.

 

Among the team is Trinity, Neo’s love interest, who plays a decisive role in his final battle to overcome the illusional powers of the Matrix. The romance of Neo and Trinity carries the belief that love between two humans is necessary if one of them is to find the inner strength to master the Matrix. Although the actors who play these two lovers are almost totally devoid of emotion, this romantic angle is perhaps the most appealing twist of the film.

 

Let’s Get Real

 

The exchange where Agent Smith tells Morpheus, “You are the plague,” occurs in the Matrix itself, that is, in a setting simulated in virtual reality (VR). This scene contains some of the more profound moments in the film. (It must be said, there is a lot of terrific dialogue in the Matrix – in the first installment, anyway.) It takes some brainwork during and after the film to realize that Agents like Smith are human replicas with no human counterparts. They are not linked to the real humans held captive in the holding tanks, but are pure constructs of AI, like Lara Croft and other video-game “avatars.” As such they are invested with superhuman power: Agents can kill human replicas in the Matrix, and when they do, the real human body attached to the replica dies. Humans who appear in the Matrix, including ordinary people on the street as well as the rebel escapees, all have their doubles outside it. The difference is, the rebels live as free beings in the real but devastated world beyond the Matrix, conscious that the Matrix is an illusion, but all the other unplugged humans who appear to live normally in the Matrix are blind to the illusion.

 

Obviously, this two-world scenario has a tremendous impact on human imagination. The notion that we inhabit a world that is somehow not real is extremely appealing to a society dominated by advertizing, entertainment, governmental fictions and untrammelled technological magic. The Matrix trilogy has been called the first sci-fi action film for intellectuals. Its creators, the Wachowski brothers, were inspired by the hady conceits of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard who has written extensively on “simulation.” Material on the Internet devoted to Baudrillard’s theories as represented in the films runs into hundreds of pages. The Wachowskis acknowledge Baudrillard as a major influence by inserting a visual cue to one of his books, Simulation and Simulacra, in the opening scene of the first film. Baudrillard himself “has snorted in derision regarding The Matrix.” He says that no film can fully explore his ideas and that the attempts to do so in these films are “misinformed and misguided.” (Taking the Red Pill, edited by Glenn Yeffeth, p. 290)

 

Whether or not the Matrix films accurately reflect Baudrillard’s recondite notions, they succeed brilliantly in presenting an extravaganza of special effects to demonstrate the spell of simulation. But the ultimate effect of this spectacle is ambiguous. If the message here is “let’s get real” and wake up from the Matrix, i.e., the artificially simulated world of electronic technology in which the human species is rapidly cocooning itself, then the question remains, “What is there to wake up to?” The life of the rebel escapees unfolds entirely on Morpheus’s ship, the Nebuchadnezzer, which navigates continually through massive sewage tunnels bored into the earth. The rebels talk of a place called Zion, the last refuge for humanity, somewhere in the interior of the planet, but Zion is never shown in the first film. The life of the rebels aboard their tunnelling spacecraft is anything but warm and cushy. One of them, Cypher, plays a Judas figure who prefers to return to the Matrix. He cuts a deal with Agent Smith who promises, when Cypher is reinserted into the mainframe of simulation, to provide him with a life of “someone important, like an actor.”

 

This is clever play on the theme of simulation, but it is cynical play. There are endless pleasures in the Matrix, all the sensory and material gratifications promised by the modern world. Weary of the tough side of being real, Cypher aspires to be an actor in an illusion, a simulation squared. The options of the film are stark: accept the illusion provided by AI, masking a horrific reality, or accept the hardship of living in a world devastated by the conflict between humanity and AI. Thousands of pages of commentary on the Matrix have been published on the Internet, and several books are dedicated to close analysis of the plot and its metaphysical ramifications. All this scrutiny fails to pose an essential question, however: What is the fate of the natural world, the original habit of the human species?

 

Beyond Simulation

 

The rebels who have liberated themselves from the Matrix do not have the option to return to living on the surface of the planet — although this option might (I suspect) arise in the third and final installment, Matrix Revolutions, due out in November 2003. Life in Zion is depicted in the second film as an underworld rave scene populated mainly by people of color invested with high tribal glamour. (“Black is beautiful” is clearly a subtext of the Matrix films.) The lily-white lovers, Neo and Trinity, played by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, stalk around wearing supercool shades and looking for all the world like Jesuits in leather designed by Armani. Almost nobody smiles except the sinister Agents and Cypher, the traitor.

 

In the first film the Matrix simulates a modern urban setting with few traces of the natural world. In the sequel, some scenes of simulated nature are shown. Presumably, if you want to go skiing in the Alps in the Matrix, the mainframe will download the required program to your cortex and you will have the entire experience exactly as if it were real. (In the second film, Neo succeeds in penetrating the mainframe where he encounters a simulated figure who claims to be the creator of the Matrix.) This recalls how VR, virtual reality, is expected to work according to the prophetic vision of many technophiles today. Captives of the Matrix can enjoy simulations of nature and never know what they’re missing. Theoretically, escapees from the Matrix could return to nature, but there is no motivation to do so if the natural world is devastated, or rendered almost unlivable. The Machines do not require the conditions necessary for human survival on the surface of the planet: oxygen to breathe, for instance. According to Agent Smith, these Machines consider the human race to be something like a virus, a plague for which AI is the cure.

 

Agent Smith tells Morpheus, “I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I’ve realized that you are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.” This is perhaps the most telling line in the first film. At this point the story line presents a comment on the audience: we, the human species, do not behave like ordinary mammals, and so we could permanently lose our place in nature. Instead of inhabiting the natural world, we infest it, like a plague.

 

In Agent Smith’s ominous words, the voice of AI condemns the human species for its rapacious consumption of natural resources and its cherished habit of overbreeding. These behaviors are inconsistent with mammalian intelligence and they devastate the natural world, as we all know so well, but our obession with AI is also part of this auto-destructive syndrome. Indeed, it may represent the endgame phase. Some sci-fi writers script into their stories the belief that our species has developed AI so that we can “downlaod ourselves into the hardware” and thus eliminate ourselves as perishable humans. One could say that AI is a means to end the human narrative. The Matrix carries this belief to its ultimate ramification: there will be no human life beyond or apart from simulation produced by the Machines, the non-human cyber-species.

 

The positive message of the Matrix films thus far is that if we as individuals awaken to the simulation in which we live, we can master it by spiritual means, by the exertion of will power and mind control. At the end of the first film, Neo uses such powers to annihilate Agent Smith. The hero exhibits superhuman abilities in the Matrix, but he remains entirely human in his extra-Matrix existence. (During their interventions into the Matrix, the rebels appear as human replicas but remain in their human physical bodies aboard the Nebuchannezzer, strapped into reclining chairs and temporarily plugged into the Matrix so that they can access and subvert it. However, if they are killed in the Matrix, they can really die in physical form, like a dreamer killed in a nightmare who actually dies in bed.)

 

Neo’s triumph over the Agents is a magical resolution with a wide range of fascinating possibilities. It recalls the esoteric practice of developing siddhis, magical faculties possessed by yogis, Zen masters and Buddhist warrior monks. To remain a liberated human and at the same time penetrate at will into the Matrix is itself an occult feat of the highest order: bilocation. (Full physical bilocation is no mere fantasy. Actual cases are attested: see Supernature by Lyall Watson, in orientation reading for Metahistory.) A sort of bilocation occurs spontaneously in out-of-the body experiences as well as in lucid dreaming, when someone wakes up in a dream knowing that they are simultaneously asleep in bed.

 

Facing the Archons

 

The way beyond the Matrix remains to be discovered. Baudrillard’s effete and largely impenetrable writings on simulation, but this may be a red herring, as there is another way, perhaps a better way, to explain what is happening in the Matrix. In a long article entitled “Gnosticism Reborn: The Matrix as Shamanic Journey,” author Jake Horsely considers how the Matrix films reflect the Gnostic myth of the Archons, alien entities who attempt to deceive humanity by simulating its thoughts and behavior. Although Horsley delves into Gnostic mythology only superficially, and does not mention the Archons except in a footnote, his essay introduces an entirely new perspective on the plot the Matrix trilogy.

 

(Horsely’s essay appears in several places on the Internet. I am citing from http://www.mindmined.com

 

Gnosticism is the name historians give to the final phase of a vast tradition of pagan spirituality that came to be condemned as heresy when Christianity rose to power. Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi documents in 1945, almost nothing was known of the core teachings of Gnosticism. The word Gnostic means simply “one who knows” but carries the implication of special insight that penetrates to the hidden core of human experience. Certain Gnostics taught that humans are deviated from their proper course of evolution by a bizarre species of inorganic beings who inhabit the solar system beyond the earth, and named this species the Archons. The Greek word archon means “authority,” and the Archons are sometimes called “the Authorities.” In the Matrix, the Agents are the authorities who police the simulated world looking for human replicas like Neo who show signs of waking up to the scam. Horsely explains the Gnostic idea that the Archons try to impose “a program of mind control, or soul enslavement [in order to] keep mankind distracted by material problems and concerns, imprisoned by its own fear of death, of mortality, and ignorant of its true, divine nature.”

 

A Gnostic perspective thus suggests that the Matrix scenario presents a cyberpunk version of a genuine spiritual dilemma, a true and daunting challenge that faces humanity, perhaps its ultimate challenge. In their warnings about deception by the Archons, Gnostics may have foreseen the risks of AI two thousand years before it emerged. However, the manner in which the Archons operate, their strategy of simulation, as it were, as described in certain Gnostic texts, does not involve advanced technological devices but religious ideology. (Horsely does not explore this point.) According to the Gnostic texts, Archontic deviation of the human species is a form of mass behaviour modification achieved through blind conformity to certain false religious beliefs, such as the belief in salvation from a sinful condition by the intervention of God or God’s only representative. In short, Gnostics rejected the salvationist ideology common to Judaism and Christanity (and later, after their elimination, Islam).

 

It is known that Gnostic ideas deeply influenced Philip K. Dick, widely considered as the greatest sci-fi writer of the twentieth century. Certainly Gnosticism presents theological and cosmological beliefs as if plotted in a science fiction novel. This characterization of Gnostic ideas is suggested by scholar Richard Smith in the afterword to The Nag Hammadi Library in English: “Gnostic motifs have been identified in that most visionary of our modern literary genres, science fiction… In the science fiction novels of the prolific writer Philip K. Dick… Gnosticism is consciously employed” (p. 546). In Valis and other works, Dick developed the idea that humans live in a “two-world hologram,” part of which is genuinely real and part of which is the deceptive projection of an alien mentality that distorts our humanity. This schizophrenic model is consistent with the Gnostic mythos.

 

With the Archons we face an alien invasion in the depths of our own minds.

 

Escape from the Matrix

 

Treated as a heresy in its time and still considered as such by the Catholic Church, Gnosticism has been widely misrepresented, even by those who claim to defend it. In particular, there is enormous disinformation around Gnostic views on the reality and value of the physical world. Many scholars declare that Gnostics “condemned matter” and regarded the natural world as evil, purely a product of Archontic deception. Nonetheless, a few dissenting voices argue that the Gnostics rejected, not the physical world per se, but our distorted perception of it. This view confirms the uncanny insight of Agent Smith: the behavior of the human species is inconsistent with sane mammalian activity. Could it be a distorted perception of nature that makes us act like a plague upon Earth?

 

According to the contemporary Gnostic revivalist Stephen Hoeller, “Gnostics did not necessarily reject the actual earth, which they recognized as a screen upon which the Demiurge [chief of the Archons] projects a deceptive system. To the extent that we find a condemnation of the world in Gnostic writings, the term used is inevitably kosmos… and never the word ge (earth), which they regarded as neutral if not outright good” (The Gnostic Jung, p. 15). Cosmos in ancient Greek did not mean the natural world or the physical universe at large. It meant “system,” recalling the use of that word in computer terminology: “operating system.” It is perhaps a ripe coincidence that the Coptic word for simulation found in Gnostic texts is hal, recalling HAL the rebellious computer in Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001!

 

Much could be said about the Gnostic elements in the Matrix, but one point is central. The deception of the Archons described in Gnostic writings is precisely what is manifested in the “neural-interactive simulation we call the Matrix” (the words of Morpheus). But if this is the case, how come the simulation that threatens to absorb humanity is technological rather than ideological, as the Gnostics believed it to be? The answer may be that the technological takeover of our species has actually been prepared long in advance by ideological deviations in our religious belief-systems, especially those religious beliefs that determine our response to the natural world. This implies a deep intrusion into the psychic territory of humanity, but it is totally consistent with the Gnostic argument that erroneous religious ideology is a kind of virus insinuated in the human mind by an alien intelligence, a non-human species comparable to the Machines in the Matrix.

 

Jake Horsley is one of the very few people writing on the Matrix who has asked, “Where is the glory of nature in the Matrix?” He notes that “I don’t believe I saw a single tree throughout the movie.” This observation returns us to the central question, here rephrased: If escaping from the simulated world of the Matrix does not take us back to the natural world where we as a species originated, where will it take us?

 

Alluding to the Romantic poet William Blake, Horsely compares Neo’s heroic quest in the Matrix to “Blake’s liberation of perception into the Imagination.” It remains to be seen if the imagination of the creators of the Matrix trilogy is up to this high standard of achievement. Whatever the case, this cinematic story challenges us to break out of the fierce technological spell of simulation and to recover our humanity through the realization of our imaginative powers. The Gnostics held imagination to be part of our divine endowment, that which distinguishes us from other mammals.

 

We are the plague, for sure, but do we also hold the cure for what ails us?

 

John Lamb Lash: June-July 2003

 

    Parzifal says, “Enjoy!”

 

 

 

Sufism is a Dance of Gnosis

The Place of Doubt in Islamic Epistemology:

Al-Ghazzali’s Philosophical Experience

OSMAN BAKR

Authentic works attributed to Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali (450/1058-505/1111) are numerous, and they deal with a vast range of subjects. But the specific work of his which has given rise to many commentaries by scholars upon the problem of doubt in his philosophical system is al-Munqidh min al-dalal (Deliverence from Error).

This autobiographical work, written about five years before al-Ghazzali’s death and most probably after his return to teaching at the Maimunah Nizamiyyah College at Naishapur in Dhu’l-qa’dah 499/July 1106, following a long period of retirement to a life of self-discipline and ascetic practices, has been variously compared by some present-day scholars with the Confessions of St. Augustine, with Newman’s Grammar of Assent in its intellectual subtlety and as an apologia pro vita sua, and also with Bunyan’s Grace Abounding in its puritanical sense. More important, from the point of view of our present discussion, is the fact that this work has often been cited to support the contention that the method of doubt is something central to al-Ghazzali’s epistemology and system of thought, and that, in this question, al-Ghazzali therefore anticipated Descartes (1596-1650). In fact, a number of comparative studies have been made concerning the place and function of doubt in the philosophies of the two thinkers.

Our aim in this chapter is to discuss the meaning and significance of doubt in the life and thought of al-Ghazzali, not as an anticipation of the method of doubt or the sceptical attitude of modern western philosophy, but as an integral element of the epistemology of Islamic intellectual tradition to which al-Ghazzali properly belongs. We will seek to analyze the nature, function and spirit of the Ghazzalian doubt. In discussing the above question, we are mindful of two important factors. One is the specific intellectual, religious, and spiritual climate prevailing in the Islamic world during the time of al-Ghazzali, which no doubt constitutes the main external contributory factor to the generation of doubt in the early phase of his intellectual life. The other concerns the whole set of opportunities which Islam ever places at the disposal of man in his quest for certainty, and what we know of al-Ghazzali’s life tells us that he was very much exposed to these opportunities. Further, the spirit of the Ghazzalian doubt can best be understood when viewed in the context of the true purpose for which al-Munqidh has been written, and also in the light of his later works.

In al-Munqidh, al-Ghazzali informs us of how in the prime of his life he was inflicted with a mysterious malady of the soul, which lasted for nearly two months during which time he was a sceptic in fact, but not in utterance and doctrine. He was a student in his early twenties at the Nizamiyyah College in Naishapur when he suffered from this disease of scepticism.

What is the nature of this Ghazzalian doubt? Al-Ghazzali tells us that his doubt has been generated in the course of his quest for certainty, that is, for knowledge of the reality of things “as they really are” (haqaiq al-umur). This knowledge of the reality of things “as they really are” is what al-Ghazzali calls al-’ilm al-yaqin, a sure and certain knowledge which he defines as “that in which the thing known is made so manifest that no doubt clings to it, nor is it accompanied by the possibility of error and deception, nor can the mind even suppose such a possibility.” Something ought to be said here about this inner quest of al-Ghazzali, because it is very much relevant to the theme of our present discussion. In fact, the meaning of this quest should never be lost sight of if we want to understand correctly the nature and significance of the Ghazzalian doubt.

In Islam, the quest for haqaiq al-umur originated with the famous prayer of the Prophet, in which he asked God to show him “things as they really are”. This prayer of the Prophet is essentially the prayer of the gnostic inasmuch as it refers to a supra-rational or inner reality of things. And for this reason, the Sufis have been the most faithful and consistent of the believers in echoing this prayer of the Prophet. The famous Sufi, Jami (d. 1492), had this prayer beautifully expanded, capturing in an eloquent manner the very spirit of the gnostic’s inner quest:

O God, deliver us from preoccupation with worldly vanities, and show us the nature of things “as they really are”. Remove from our eyes the veil of ignorance, and show us things as they really are. Show us not non-existence as existent, nor cast the veil of non-existence over the beauty of existence. Make this phenomenal world the mirror to reflect the manifestation of Thy beauty, not a veil to separate and repel us from Thee. Cause these unreal phenomena of the Universe to be for us the sources of knowledge and insight, not the causes of ignorance and blindness. Our alienation and severance from Thy beauty all proceed from ourselves. Deliver us from ourselves, and accord to us intimate knowledge of Thee.

Al-Ghazzali’s quest for certainty, as he defined it, is none other than this quest of the Gnostic. Initially, however it was a purely intellectual quest. There were both internal and external forces at work in fueling that quest to the point of generating a period of intense doubt in the youthful life of al-Ghazzali. Internally, by his own admission, his natural intellectual disposition has always been to grasp the real meaning of things. As for external forces, we have already referred to the most important of these, namely, the various intellectual, religious and spiritual currents of al-Ghazzali’s times, all of which must have engaged his highly reflective and contemplative mind. It is quite clear from the Munqidh that these various currents were of great concern to him.

In fact, al-Ghazzali traced the genesis of his famous dobut to these currents. He was struck by the diversity of religious and creeds, and by the fact that the followers of each religion cling stubbornly to their inherited beliefs. One consequence of his critical reflection upon this religious phenomenon was that he began to question uncritically inherited religious beliefs. One consequence of his critical reflection upon this religious phenomenon was that he began to question uncritically inherited religious beliefs (taqlidat). But living as he was in an age in which the idea of Transcendence was very much a living reality in the souls of men, the problem of diversity of religions did not lead al-Ghazzali to the kind of relativism that is rampant in modern times as a response to the same problem. On the contrary, it was to lead him to the search for the inner reality of human nature, that is, man’s primordial nature (fitrah), which on the earthly plane becomes the receptacle for the multiplicity of religious forms and expressions.

Contrary to the view held by some modern interpreters of his thought, al-Ghazzali was not against taqlid as such. He never advocated at any time for its total abandonment. In fact, he considered it necessary for the simple believers whose minds are free of the kind of intellectual curiosity one finds in philosophers and scientists, and who are therefore content to accept things based on the authority of the experts. Al-Ghazzali’s criticism of taqlid must be seen in the context o his quest for the highest level of certainty, a quest which, in fact, though not in principle, is the concern, not of the majority, but of the few like him. From the point of view of this quest, taqlid is certainly a great impediment to its realization. Consequently, al-Ghazzali let himself loose from the bonds of taqlid (rabitat al-taqlid).

Here, one needs to make a clear distinction between taqlid, which is a particular manner of acquiring ideas, and taqlidat which are the ideas themselves. This distinction is somehow seldom noted by many students of Ghazzalian thought. Al-Ghazzali’s rejection of taqlid for himself stemmed from his methodological criticism of its inherent limitations, while in accepting it for the simple-minded he was simply affirming an important aspect of the subjective reality of the human order, namely, that individual human beings differ from one another in intellectual capability. The unreliability of taqlid stems from the fact that it is susceptible to lending itself to both true and false taqlidat. The solution to the problem of false taqlidat, however, is not sought through the complete eradication of taqlid, which is practically impossible, but through addressing oneself to the question of the truth or falsity of the taqlidat themselves. Thus, in the Munqidh, al-Ghazzali tells us how, after reflecting upon the problem of taqlid, he sought to sift out these taqlidat, to discern those that are true from those that are false. A lot of his intellectual efforts were indeed devoted to this task.

For al-Ghazzali, the positive function of taqlid, namely, the acceptance of truths based on authority, is to be protected by those who have been entrusted with true knowledge, who constitute the legitimate authority to interpret and clarify knowledge about religious and spiritual matters. As it pertains to knowledge, another aspect of the reality of the human order affirmed by al-Ghazzali is that there are degrees or levels of knowledge and, consequently, of knowers. This view has its basis in the Quranic verse which al-Ghazzali quoted: “God raises in degrees those of you who believe and those to whom knowledge is given.” In Islamic theory of knowledge, there is a hierarchy of intellectual and spiritual authorities culminating in the Holy Prophet, and ultimately God Himself. Faith (iman), which is a level of knowledge, says al-Ghazzali, is the favorable acceptance (husn al-zann) of knowledge based on hearsay and experience of others, of which the most reliable is that of the Prophet.

There has been objection from certain modernist circles that the idea of admissibility of taqlid for one group of people and its prohibition for another is socially unacceptable and even dangerous, for it can lead to the crystallization of a caste

system, which is against the very spirit of Islam. What has been said above is actually already sufficient to render this objection invalid. Nevertheless, we like to quote here the rebuttal of a scholar who has bemoaned the banishment of the Islamic idea of hierarchy of knowledge and of authorities at the hands of the modernists:

“In respect of the human order in society, we do not in the least mean by ‘hierarchy’ that semblance of it wherein oppression and exploitation and domination are legitimized as if they were an established principle ordained by God … The fact that hierarchical disorders have prevailed in human society does not mean that hierarchy in the human order is not valid, for there is, in point of fact, legitimate hierarchy in the order of creation, and this is the Divine Order pervading all Creation and manifesting the occurrence of justice.”

It is this idea of the hierarchy of knowledge and of being which is central to al-Ghazzali’s epistemology and. system of thought, and he himself would be the last person to say that such an idea implies the legitimization of a social caste system in Islam.

To sum up our discussion of al-Ghazzali’s methodological criticism of taqlid, we can say that he was dissatisfied with it because it could not quench his intense intellectual thirst. It was obvious to him at that young age that taqlid is an avenue to both truth and error, but as to what is true and what is false there was an open sea of debate around him, which disturbed him profoundly. It led him to contemplate upon one of the most central questions in philosophy, namely, the question of what true knowledge is, and this marked the beginning of an intensification of his intellectual doubt.

Besides the problem of the diversity of religions and creeds, in which a major issue was taqlid, there was another, and more important, religious and spiritual current which contributed to the genesis of his doubt and which deeply affected his mind. This he mentioned as the existence of numerous schools of thought (madhdhib) and groups (firaq) within the Community of Islam itself, each with its own methods of understanding and affirming the truth and each claiming that it alone is saved. Al-Ghazzali comments in the Munqidh that in this state of affairs of the Community, which he likens to “a deep sea in which most men founder and from which few only are saved”, one finds the fulfilment of the famous promise of the Prophet: “My Community will split into seventy-odd sects, of which one will be saved”.

The above religious climate was not peculiar to the times of al-Ghazzali alone. A few centuries earlier, al-Harith b. Asad al-Muhasibi (165/781-243-837), another famous Sufi, whose writings exercised a great influence on al-Ghazzali, lamented the similar pitiful state of affairs into which the Islamic community has fallen. In fact, the autobiographical character of the Munqidh may have been modeled on the introduction to al-Muhasibi’s work, Kitab al-wasaya (or al-nasaih), which is also autobiographical in character.

The following extract from this work reveals striking similarities to certain passages in the Munqidh, and gives some indication as to the kind of religious climate prevailing during the time of al-Muhasibi:

It has come to pass in our days, that this community is divided into seventy and more sects: of these, one only is the way of salvation, and for the rest, God knows best concerning them. Now I have not ceased, not so much as one moment of my life, to consider well the differences into which the community has fallen, and to search after the clear way and the true path, whereunto I have searched both theory and practice, and looked, for guidance on the road to the world to come, to the directing of the theologians. Moreover, I have studied much of the doctrine of Almighty God, with the interpretation of the lawyers, and reflected upon the various conditions of the community, and considered its diverse doctrines and sayings. Of all this I understood as much as was appointed for me to understand: and I saw that their divergence was as it were a deep sea, wherein many had been drowned, and but a small band escaped therefrom; and I saw every party of them asserting that salvation was to be found in following them, and that he would perish who opposed them …

It is interesting to note that, although al-Ghazzali’s autobiographical work is more dramatic and eloquent than that of al-Muhasibi, both men were led into an almost similar kind of intellectual crisis through similar external circumstances. Both sought the light of certainty and that knowledge which guarantees salvation, and they found that light in Sufism. In the process, they accomplished a philosophical as well as a sociological analysis of knowledge, the details of which remain to be studied. But having said this much, we may add that al-Ghazzali’s philosophical discussion of doubt (shakk) and certainty (yaqin) can still claim originality in more ways than one.

Having discussed the main factors which contributed to the generation of the Ghazzalian doubt, and to his formulation of the fundamental idea of “true knowledge” we now proceed to investigate into the philosophical meaning and significance of this doubt. We have seen earlier how al-Ghazzali defined the kind of certain and infallible knowledge (al-`ilm al-yaqin) which he was seeking. It is that knowledge which is completely free from any error or doubt, and with which the heart finds complete satisfaction. Is such a kind of certainty or certitude possible? It is significant that al-Ghazzali never explicitly posed that question. But, armed with the above criteria of certainty, he proceeded immediately to scrutinize the whole state of his knowledge. He found himself “devoid of any knowledge answering the previous description except in the case of sensedata (hissiyyat) and the self-evident truths (daruriyyat) “ He then set out to induce doubt (tashkik) against his sense-data to determine whether they could withstand his test of infallibility and indubitability. The outcome of this effort, in which reason (`aql) appeared as judge over the claims of the senses to certitude, was that his reliance on sense-data proved no longer tenable. The charge of falsity leveled by reason against sense-perceptions could not be rebutted by the senses.

With his reliance on sense-data shattered, al-Ghazzali sought refuge in the certainty of rational data which “belong to the category of primary truths, such as our asserting that `Ten is more than three’, and `One and the same thing cannot -be simultaneously affirmed and denied’, and `One and the same thing cannot be incipient and eternal, existent and non-existent, necessary and impossible’ ”. However, this refuge in the rational data (`aqliyyat) too was not safe from elements of doubt. This time, doubt crept in through an objection, made on behalf of sense-data, against the claims of reason to certitude.

As explained in the Munqidh, these claims of reason are not refuted in the same way reason itself has earlier refuted the claims of the senses. They are merely subjected to doubt by means of analogical argumentations. Still, it is a doubt which reason proves unable to dispel in an incontrovertible manner. Reason is reminded of the possibility of another judge superior to itself, which if it were to reveal itself would “give the lie to the judgments of reason, just as the reason judge revealed itself and gave the lie to the judgments of sense”. The mere fact of the non- appearance of this other judge does not prove the impossibility of its existence.

This inner debate within the soul of al-Ghazzali turned for the worse when its suggestion of the possibility of another kind of perception beyond reason was reinforced by various kinds of evidences and argumentations. First of all, an appeal was made to reason to exercise the principle of analogy to the phenomena of dreaming. Through this principle, reason would have realized that the relation of this suggested supra-rational state to our waking state, when the senses and reason are fully functional, is like the relation of the latter to our dreaming state. If our waking state judges our imaginings and beliefs in the dreaming state to be groundless, the supra-rational state likewise judges our rational beliefs.

This argumentation appears as if al-Ghazzali, himself one of the most respected jurists, was addressing the jurists and other proponents of reason, who were well-versed with the principle of analogy. We are not suggesting here that these targeted groups were in al-Ghazzali’s mind at the time he was experiencing this inner debate. His indirect reference to them could well have surfaced at the time of his writing the Munqidh inasmuch as this work was written with a view of impressing upon the rationalists that Islamic epistemology affirms suprarational perceptions as the real key to knowledge. Thus, al-Ghazzali reproaches the rationalists in the Munqidh: “Therefore, whoever thinks that the unveiling of truth depends on precisely formulated proofs has indeed straitened the broad mercy of God”.

Next to confront reason in support of the possibility of a supra-rational state was the presence of a group of people called the Sufis, who claimed that they had actually experienced that state. They alleged that during their experience of these supra rational states, they saw phenomena which are not in accord with the normal data of reason. Finally, the last piece of evidence brought to the attention of reason is the prophetic saying, “Men are asleep: then after they die they awake”, and the Quranic verse “Thou was heedless of this; now have We removed thy veil, and sharp is thy sight this day”. Both the hadith and the Quranic verse quoted refer to man’s state after death, and reason is told that, may be, this is the state in question.

All these objections to the claim of reason to have the final say to truth could not be refuted satisfactorily by reason. The mysterious malady of al-Ghazzali’s soul, which lasted for nearly two months, is none other than this inner tussle or tension between its rational faculty and another faculty which mounts an appeal to the former, through the senses, to accept its existence and the possibility of those experiences that have been associated with its various powers, such as those claimed by the Sufis. This other faculty, which is supra-rational and supra-logical, is the intuitive faculty which, at this particular stage of al-Ghazzali’s intellectual life, had not yet developed beyond the mere ability to theorize and acknowledge the possibility of supra-rational experiences. Later, during a period of intense spiritual life, he claimed to have been invested with higher powers of the faculty, which disclosed to him innumerable mysteries of the spiritual world. These powers al-Ghazzali termed kashf (direct vision) and dhawq (translated as fruitional experience by McCarthy, and immediate experience by Watt).

The gradational movement from sense-data to rational data presented no serious difficulty, but the first direct encounter between his rational and intuitive experiences proved to be a painful one for al-Ghazzali. His two-month period of being “sceptic in fact, but not in utterance and doctrine” was the period of having to endure intense doubts about the reliability of his rational faculty in the face of certain assertive manifestations of the intuitive faculty. His problem was one of finding the rightful place for each of the human faculties of knowing within the total scheme of knowledge, and, in particular, of establishing the right relationship between reason and intuition, as this latter term is traditionally understood.

Thus, when he was cured of this sickness, not through rational arguments or logical proofs but through the effect of a light (nur) which God cast into his breast, his intellectual equilibrium was restored, and he once again accepted the reliability of rational data of the category of daruriyyat. However, in this newfound intellectual equilibrium, reason no longer occupied the dominant position it used to have. In al-Ghazzali’s own words, that light which God cast into his breast is the key to most knowledge”.

We do not agree with the view of certain scholars that the method of doubt is something central to al-Ghazzali’s epistemology and system of thought. The Munqidh does not support the view that al-Ghazzali was advocating systematic doubt as an instrument in the investigation of truth”. And there is nothing to be found in it, which is comparable to Descartes’ assertion that “it is necessary once in one’s life to doubt of all things, so far as this is possible”. This brings us to the question of the true nature of al-Ghazzali’s first personal crisis.

McCarthy describes al-Ghazzali’s crisis of scepticism as an epistemological crisis, which is of the intellect alone, in contrast to his second personal crisis which is a crisis of conscience, and of the spirit. Father Poggi, whose Un Classico delta Spiritualita Musulmana is considered by McCarthy to be one of the finest studies on al-Ghazzali and the Munqidh, does not consider the youthful scepticism of al-Ghazzali as real but purely a methodical one. Another celebrated Italian Orientalist, Guiseppe Furlani, also agrees that the doubt of al-Ghazzali is not that of a sceptic, but rather of a critic of knowledge.

We agree with the common view of these scholars that, at the time of his crisis, al-Ghazzali was neither a philosophical nor a religious sceptic, and that the crisis was an epistemological or methodical one. The Munqidh provides ample evidence to support this view. Al-Ghazzali was not a philosophical sceptic because he never contested the value of metaphysical certitude. He was always certain of the de jure certitude of truth. Thus, as we have earlier mentioned, he never questioned the possibility of knowledge of haqa’iq al-umur. His natural, intellectual disposition toward seeking that knowledge was, in a way, an affirmation of his personal conviction in the de jure certitude of truth.

According to Schuon, it is the agnostics and other relativists who sought to demonstrate the illusory character of the de jure certitude of truth by opposing to it the de facto certitude of error, as if the psychological phenomenon of false certitudes could prevent true certitudes from being what they are and from having all their effectiveness and as if the very existence of false certitudes did not prove in its own way the existence of true ones. As for al-Ghazzali, he never fell into the above philosophical temptation of the agnostics and relativists. His doubt was not of truth itself, but of modes of knowing and modes of accepting truth. But, since by truth, he meant here the inner reality of things, his quest for that reality also implied a quest for its corresponding mode of knowledge.

His criticism of all modes of knowing that were then within his practical reach was motivated by a real theoretical awareness of the possibility of another mode of knowing, which the Sufis claim as theirs. In the case of al-Ghazzali, this possibility must have agitated his mind right from the time it was first impressed upon him through his direct personal encounter with the way of the Sufis. We may recall here the early educational background of al-Ghazzali. It was an education which was permeated by a strong influence of Sufism. His father, says al-Subki, was a pious dervish who spent as much time as he could in the company of the Sufis.

The first teacher to whom his early education was entrusted was a pious Sufi friend of his. Studying together with him then was his younger brother, Ahmad al-Ghazzaf (d. 1126) who, though less famous, later made his mark as a great Sufi whose disciples include ‘Abd al-Qahir Abu Najib al-Suhrawardi (d. 1168), the founder of the Suhrawardiyyah Order, and most probably, as believed by a number of scholars, al-Ghazzali himself. As a student at Naishapur, one of the subjects he studied was Sufism. He also became a disciple to the Sufi, Abu `Ali al-Fadl ibn Muhammad ibn `Ali al-Farmadhi al-Tusi, who was a pupil of al-Qushairi (d. 465/1074). Al-Ghazzali learnt from al-Farmadhi (d. 477/1084) the theory and practice of Sufism and, under the latter’s guidance, even indulged in certain ascetic and spiritual practices.

He was increasingly attracted to the idea of a direct personal experience of God emphasized by the Sufis. However, he felt a bit disheartened when, in these early attempts at following the Sufi path, he failed to attain that stage where the mystics begin to receive pure inspiration from “high above”. In the light of this background, there is a strong reason to believe that Sufism plays a central role in leading al-Ghazzali to his epistemological crisis. Al-Ghazzali’s doubt of the trustworthiness of reason was not generated from “below” or by the reflection of reason upon its own self, but was suggested from “above” as a result of his acquaintance with the Sufi’s mode of knowledge, which claims to be supra-rational and which “offers its own critique of reason”. Likewise, the doubt was removed not through the power of reason, but from “above” as a result of the light of divine grace, which restores to each faculty of knowledge its rightful position and its validity and trustworthiness at its own level.

Al-Ghazzali was also never at any time a religious sceptic. He tells us in the Munqidh that, throughout his quest for certainty, he always had an unshakable belief in the three fundamentals of the Islamic faith:

“From the sciences which I had practiced and the methods which I had followed in my inquiry into the two kinds of knowledge, revealed and rational, I had already acquired a sure and certain faith in God Most High, in the prophetic mediation of revelation, and in the Last Day. These three fundamentals of our Faith had become deeply rooted in my soul, not because of any specific, precisely formulated proofs, but because of reasons and circumstances and experiences too many to list in detail.”

The above quotation is yet another evidence provided by the Munqidh that al-Ghazzali’s so called scepticism is not to be equated with the scepticism encountered in modern western philosophy. The doubting mind of al-Ghazzali was never cut off from revelation and faith. On the contrary, it was based upon a “sure and certain” faith in the fundamentals of religion. As for the doubting mind of the modern sceptic, it is cut off from both the intellect and revelation and, in the pursuit of its directionless activity, it has turned against. faith itself. Now, what is the distinction between the “sure and certain” faith which al-Ghazzali always had and that certainty which he was ever eager to seek? We will deal briefly with this question because in its very answer lies the significance of the Ghazzalian doubt and also because charges have been leveled against al-Ghazzali by scholars like J. Obermann that his haunting doubts of objective reality led him to find sanctuary in religious subjectivism.

The answer to the above question is to be found in the idea of certainty (yaqin) in Islamic gnosis. There are degrees of certainty: in the terminology of the Quran, these are `ilm al-yaqin (science of certainty), `ayn al-yaqin (vision of certainty) and haqq al yaqin (truth of certainty). These have been respectively compared to hearing about the description of fire, seeing fire and being consumed by fire. As applied to al-Ghazzaii’s quest for certainty, the “sure and certain” faith, which he claimed he had acquired from his inquiry into the various sciences, referred to `ilm al-yaqin, since his acceptance of the truths concerned was inferential in nature, based as it was upon data furnished by revelation and the authority of the Prophet. In other words, at the level of faith, the particular truth which is the object of the faith is not known directly or with immediacy. Nevertheless, to the extent that in one’s act of faith one participates in the truth through both reason and heart, faith already implies a particular level of knowledge and of certainty. Thus, from the beginning of al-Ghazzali’s quest for the true knowledge of the Real, a certain element of certitude was always present.

In the Kitab al-`ilm (Book of Knowledge) of his magnum opus, Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din (The Revivification of the Religious Sciences), al-Ghazzali discussed the usage of the term yaqin by the major intellectual schools of Islam up to his time. He identified two distinct meanings to which the term was being applied. In one group were the philosophers (nuzzir) and the theologians (mutakallimun), who employed the term to signify lack or negation of doubt, in the sense that the knowledge or the truth in question is established from evidence which leaves no place for any possibility of doubt. The second meaning of the term yaqin was the one adopted by the jurists and the Sufis as well as most of the learned men. Yaqin, in this case, refers to the intensity of religious faith or fervor which involves both the acceptance, by the soul, of that which “prevails over the heart and takes hold of it” and the submission of the soul to that thing in question.

For al-Ghazzali, both kinds of yaqin need to be strengthened, but it is the second kind of yaqin which is the nobler of the two, since without it serving as an epistemological basis for the first kind of yaqin, the latter would definitely lack epistemic substance and value. Moreover, it fosters religious and spiritual obedience, and praiseworthy habits. In other words, philosophical certainty is of no value if it is not accompanied by submission to the truth and by the transformation of one’s being in conformity with that truth. Although the jurists and the Sufis both have been identified with the second kind of yaqin, they are generally concerned with different levels of yaqin. The Sufis are basically concerned with a direct or immediate experience of the Truth, and with submission to the Pure Spirit not merely at the level of external meanings of the Shariah (Divine Law) but at all levels of the selfhood. For this reason, the degrees of certainty earlier mentioned properly belong to ma’rifah (Islamic gnosis) rather than to fiqh (jurisprudence). In al-Ghazzali’s popular terminology in the Ihya’, these belong to ‘ilm al-mukashafah (science of revelation) and not to ‘ilm al-mu’amalah (science of practical religion).

Reverting back to al-Ghazzali’s “sure and certain faith”, there are, with respect to his ultimate goal, deficiencies both in his modes of knowing and in the submission of his whole being. Deficiency in the former was a root cause of his first personal crisis which, as we have seen, was epistemological in nature. Deficiency in the latter had a lot to do with his second personal crisis which was spiritual, although the two crisis are not unrelated. We have identified al-Ghazzali’s “sure and certain faith” with certainty at the level of ‘ilm alyaqin which refers to a particular manner of participation in the Truth. Objectively, if doubts could be generated about the trustworthiness of ‘ilm al-yaqin as being the highest level of certainty, it is because a higher level of certitude is possible, for as Schuon profoundly says, if man is able to doubt, this is because certitude exists.

Al-Ghazzali’s acquaintance with the methodology of the Sufis made him aware of the de jure certitude of truth of a higher level. At the time of his epistemological crisis, he was only certain of this certitude in the sense of ‘ilm al-yaqin. After the crisis, as a result of the light of intellectual intuition which he received from Heaven, that certainty was elevated to the level of ‘ayn al-yaqin. This newfound certainty was not the end of al-Ghazzali’s intellectual and spiritual quest. He had a longing for the mystical experience of the Sufis. He had indulged in some of their spiritual practices but without success in terms of fruitional experience. This must have been a lingering source of inner discontent in him. He was to realize later his major fault: he was too engrossed in worldly desires and ambitions such as fame and fortune, while the efficacy of spiritual practices presupposes a certain frame of mind and a certain level of spiritual virtues like the sincerity of one’s intention.

Al-Ghazzali mentions in the Munqidh that immediately after his first crisis was over, he proceeded to study with greater thoroughness the views and methods of the various seekers of the Truth. He divided the seekers into four groups. These were “the mutakallimun (theologians) who allege that they are men of independent judgment and reasoning; the batinites who claim to be the unique possessors of al-ta`lim (authoritative instruction) and the privileged recipients of knowledge acquired from the Infallible Imam; the philosophers who maintain that they are the men of logic and apodeictic demonstration; and finally the Sufis who claim to be the familiars of the Divine Presence and the men of mystic vision and illumination”. There is no doubt that al-Ghazzali had undertaken this comparative study of all the classes of seekers of the Truth with the view of exhausting all the possibilities and opportunities that were open to him in the pursuit of the highest level of certainty, although by then one could already detect in him a special inclination and sympathy toward Sufism.

At the end of this thorough study, he came to the conclusion that “the Sufis were masters of states (arbab al-ahwal) and not purveyors of words (ashab al-aqwal)”. He also came to realize that there was a great difference between theoretical knowledge and realized knowledge. To illustrate the difference he gave the following example. There is a great difference between our knowing the definitions, causes, and conditions of health and satiety and our being healthy and sated, between our knowing the definition of drunkenness and our beingdrunk, and between our knowing the true nature and conditions of asceticism and our actually practicing asceticism. Certitude derived from realized knowledge is what haqq al-yaqin is. This knowledge is free from error and doubt because it is not based on conjecture or mental concepts, but it resides in the heart and thus involves the whole of man’s being.

Realized knowledge, however, demands the transformation of the knower’s being. The distinctive characteristic of the Sufi mode of knowledge, says al-Ghazzali, is that it seeks the removal of deformations of the soul such as pride, passional attachment to the world and a host of other reprehensible habits and vicious qualities, all of which stand as obstacles to the realization of that knowledge, in order to attain a heart empty of all save God and adorned with the constant remembrance of God. This led al-Ghazzali to reflect upon his own state of being. He realized the pitiful state of his soul and became certain that he was “on the brink of a crumbling bank and already on the verge of falling into the Fire” unless he set about mending his ways. Before him now lies the most important decision he has to make in his life. For about six months he incessantly vacillated between the contending pull of worldly desires and the appeals of the afterlife. This is al-Ghazzali’s second personal crisis which is spiritual and far more serious than the first, because it involves a decision of having to abandon one kind of life for another which is essentially opposed to the former. He tells us how, at last, when he has completely lost his capacity to make a choice, God delivers him from the crisis by making it easy for his heart to turn away from the attractions of the world. In the spiritual path of the Sufis, al-Ghazzali found the light of certainty that he has tirelessly sought from the beginning of his intellectual awareness of what that certainty is.

It is therefore in the light of Islamic epistemology and, especially in the light of the idea of degrees of certainty (yaqin) in Islamic gnosis that the famous Ghazzalian doubt should be studied and understood. When al-Ghazzali turned to his own inner being to find the light of certainty, it was not an exercise in religious subjectivism or an act of disillusionment with objective reality, as maintained by scholars like Obermann and Furlani. On the contrary, al-Ghazzali was drawn to the highest objective reality that is. The Ultimate Truth underlying objective reality is identical to the Supreme Self underlying human selfhood or man’s subjective consciousness. The intellectual and spiritual tradition in which al-Ghazali lived and thought made him fully aware of the fact that what veils man from this highest reality is the darkness of his own soul. Therefore in turning to his own inner being, al-Ghazzali was merely following that traditional path which alone could guarantee, by divine grace, the removal of that veil. This is the universal path of all the real seekers of the Truth, of which al-Ghazzali was an outstanding example.

The title of the book occurs in two readings. One is A!-Munqidh min al-dalal wall-mufsil ‘an al-ahwal (What Saves from Error and Manifests the States of the Soul); the other is Al-Munqidh min al-dalal wa’l-Muwassil (or: al-Musil) ili dhi’l-’iza wa’l jalal (What Saves from Error and Unites with the Possessor of Power and Glory).

For an annotated English translation of this work, based upon the earliest available manuscript, as well as translations of a number of al-Ghazzali’s other works that are specifically mentioned in the Munqidh, see R. Joseph McCarthy, Freedom and Fulfillment: An Annotated Translation of al-Ghazali’s al-Munqidh min al-dalal and Other Relevant Works of al-Ghazzali (Boston, 1980). For references to translations of the Munqidh into various languages, see p. xxv.

See M. ‘Umaruddin, The Ethical Philosophy of al-Ghazzali (Lahore, 1977), p. 286, note 2 to chap. IV; also, Wensinck, La Pensee de Ghazzali, p. 111.

See M. lqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan & Institute of Islamic Culture, 1989), p. 102; M. Saeed Sheikh, “Al-Ghazzali: Metaphysics” in M. M. Sharif, A History of Muslim Philosophy (Wiesbaden, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 587-588; Sami M. Najm, “The Place and Function of Doubt in the Philosophies of Descartes and al-Ghazzali”; and also W. Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali (Chicago 1982), p. 12.

McCarthy, op.cit., p.66.

Al-Ghazzali, Munqidh min al-dalal, p. 11. The text cited here is the one published together with its French translation by Farid Jabre, Erreur et Deliverance (Beirut, 1969).

McCarthy, op. cit., p. 63.

Jami, Lawa’ih, A Treatise On Sufism, trans. E. H. Whinfield and M. M. Kazvini, (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1914), p. 2.

For a profound critique of the modern interpretation of the meaning of diversity of religions, see F. Schoun, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom (Middlesex: Perennial book, 1978), Chap. 1.

Al-Ghazzali, Munqidh …, p. 11.

The Quran, Chapter LVIII (The Woman who Pleads), Verse 11. See McCarthy, op. cit., p.96.

Al-Ghazzali, Munqidh, p.40.

al-Attas, S.M.N., Islam and Secularism (Kuala Lumpur: ABIM, 1978), p.101.

On the life and teaching of this early Sufi figure, see Margaret Smith, An Early Mystic of Baghdad: A Study of the Life and Teaching of Harith ibn Asad al-Muhasibi (London, 1935).

See A.J. Arberry,

 

PKD says Parzifal is Gnostic!

Parsifal as Proto-SF

Andrew May

Richard Wagner’s Parsifal is about ideas – very abstract ideas of philosophy, metaphysics and theology. This places Parsifal firmly in the realm of speculative fiction. Moreover, the focus of speculation in Wagner’s opera is remarkably similar to that found in the novels of Philip K Dick and in the Matrix trilogy.

Parsifal is discussed extensively in Philip K Dick’s 1981 novel, Valis. Indeed, for some SF readers, Valis may be the only context they have ever encountered Parsifal. Chapter 8 of Valis contains a nice little précis of Wagner’s opera, which we can use as a starting point:

The leader of the grail knights, Amfortas, has a wound which will not heal. Klingsor has wounded him with the spear which pierced Christ’s side. Later, when Klingsor hurls the spear at Parsifal, the pure fool catches the spear – which has stopped in midair – and holds it up, making the sign of the Cross with it, at which Klingsor and his entire castle vanish. They were never there in the first place; they were a delusion, what the Greeks call dokos; what the Indians call the veil of maya. There is nothing that Parsifal cannot do. At the end of the opera, Parsifal touches the spear to Amfortas’s wound and the wound heals.

Expanding on that, an act-by-act synopsis would go something like this:

• Act 1: The knights of the Grail are miserable because of Amfortas’s suffering. However, there is a ray of hope – some mysterious writing has appeared on the surface of the Grail prophesying the coming of a redeemer, who is described as “the guileless fool”. Right on cue, Parsifal turns up and starts behaving like a guileless fool. So much so, that the knights get fed up with him and kick him out.
• Act 2: Parsifal’s wanderings take him to the castle of Klingsor, the evil sorcerer who has stolen the holy spear. Klingsor tries to destroy Parsifal by various means, eventually sending the witch Kundry to seduce him. However, as soon as Kundry kisses Parsifal, he becomes enlightened and understands everything. He sees through Klingsor’s illusions and recovers the stolen spear.
• Act 3: Parsifal returns to the land of the Grail, where he uses the spear to cure Amfortas and absolve Kundry of her sins. The opera ends with the very strange words “the redeemer redeemed”. Fans of science fiction may perceive a number of striking parallels between the plot of Parsifal and that of The Matrix. I’m not sure if these parallels are a deliberate homage to Parsifal or just an accident. It’s well known that the Wachowski brothers are avid readers of all kinds of things, and that a lot of their reading found its way into The Matrix in one form or another. Equally, I’ve seen The Matrix described as a kind of intellectual Rorschach test where you can find anything you want if you look hard enough. Whether they are coincidences or deliberate allusions, the plot parallels between Parsifal and The Matrix can be summarised as follows:

Parsifal The Matrix The Grail’s prophecy (the guileless fool) The Oracle’s prophecy (the One) Kundry’s kiss causes Parsifal’s “awakening” Trinity’s kiss causes Neo’s “awakening” Parsifal sees through Klingsor’s illusions Neo sees through the illusion of the Matrix Parsifalstops the spear in mid-air Neo stops a salvo of bullets in mid-air Parsifal ends up as a Christ-like saviour Neo ends up as a Christ-like saviour

The connections between Parsifal and The Matrix go beyond similarities of plot. The music, if nothing else, contains deliberate references to Wagner, as the following quotation from Don Davies (composer on all three Matrix films) shows:

When we were spotting [Matrix] Revolutions the word “Wagnerian” came up very often. And the reason was because, you know Wagner was very much a fan of Schopenhauer. He was actually obsessed with the Schopenhauer ideas of will and representation… And it was significant enough to both Larry and Andy [Wachowski] and myself that we felt working on the third part of this trilogy, which is significantly about philosophy – no less Schopenhauer than Hegel and Kant and Heidegger and Kierkegaard, but still definitely Schopenhauerian and also Nietzsche, who was a close friend of Wagner’s up until Parsifal, when they had a falling out. One of the things I did in acknowledging this Wagnerian tradition of philosophy in multi-media drama was that I quoted the Tristan chord over the Deus Ex Machina. [Quoted at http://www.music.ign.com%5D

That’s a great phrase – “this Wagnerian tradition of philosophy in multi-media drama” – Wagner’s operas are certainly multi-media dramas, and Parsifal does have a lot of philosophy in it. And in that respect, The Matrix films are its direct lineal descendants.

The previous quotation mentioned Schopenhauer, who was certainly the biggest influence on Wagner at the time he was writing Parsifal. However, Wagner was an avid reader (a bit like the Wachowskis!) and he drew on many other sources as well. Some of the books he’s known to have read in connection with Parsifal are as follows:

• Chrétien de Troyes: Perceval (12th century)
• Wolfram von Eschenbach: Parzival (13th century)
• Meister Eckhart: sermons (13th century)
• Hafez: poems (14th century)
• The Upanishads (translated by Duperron, 1804)
• Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation (1844)
• Burnouf: History of Indian Buddhism (1844)
• Ramayana (translated by Holtzmann, 1847)
• Spence Hardy: Manual of Buddhism (1853)
• Renan: Life of Jesus (1863)
• Sutta Nipata (translated by Coomaraswamy, 1874)

The Grail legends, mediaeval mysticism, Schopenhauer, Buddhism, Hinduism… all the subjects you would expect to find in the New Age section of Waterstones or Barnes & Noble in the 21st century! Yet here was Wagner reading these books way back in the 1860s and 70s! Even the Life of Jesus was an early example of the now-popular “Jesus the man” genre, rather than a straightforward New Testament commentary.

On the face of it, Parsifal is a Christian opera. The Grail is the cup of Christ, the spear is the weapon that pierced Christ’s side, and Parsifal defeats Klingsor using the sign of the cross. But in Wagner’s hands, Christianity is transformed into something distinctly unorthodox. Heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, Wagner believed that Christians no longer understood the true meaning of their own religion:

This act of denying the will is the true action of the saint: That it is ultimately accomplished only in a total end to individual consciousness – for there is no other consciousness except that which is personal and individual – was lost sight of by the naïve saints of Christianity… This most profound of all instincts finds purer and more meaningful expression in the oldest and most sacred religion known to man, in Brahmin teaching, and especially in its final transfiguration in Buddhism. [Letter from Wagner to Franz Liszt, dated June 1855]

There is probably very little truth in that statement, viewed in the light of modern scholarship – but the important thing is that it’s what Wagner believed to be true at the time he wrote Parsifal.

Wagner was impressed by the symbols of religion, even though he knew they were nothing more than symbols. He realised that a symbol such as the Grail could be very powerful even if there was no literal truth to it:

An old legend existed in southern France telling how Joseph of Arimathea had once fled there with the sacred chalice that had been used at the Last Supper… I feel a very real admiration and sense of rapture at this splendid feature of Christian mythogenesis, which invented the most profound symbol that could ever have been invented as the content of the physical-spiritual kernel of any religion. [Letter from Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, dated May 1859]

As he was putting the finishing touches to Parsifal, Wagner made his views on religious symbolism even more explicit in an essay entitled Religion and Art (1880):

Whereas the priest is concerned only that the religious allegories should be regarded as factual truths, this is of no concern to the artist, since he presents his work frankly and openly as his invention.

It’s amusing to consider this last quotation in the context of Dan Brown – who may or may not be an artist, but who has certainly made a lot of money by presenting invention in the guise of literal truth! There’s a brief mention of Parsifal in The Da Vinci Code, and like most statements in that book it’s almost entirely erroneous:

… Wagner’s opera Parsifal was a tribute to Mary Magdalene and the bloodline of Jesus Christ, told through the story of a young knight on a quest for truth. [Dan Brown: The Da Vinci Code, Chapter 95]

Well, I don’t think Wagner’s opera was meant as a tribute to Mary Magdalene and any bloodline of Christ, and I don’t think Parsifal was “on a quest for truth”. But there’s one interesting parallel between Parsifal and The Da Vinci Code, in that both Wagner and Dan Brown use the same dubious etymology for the Grail:

The Saviour’s blood ( Sang réale, whence San Gréal – The Holy Grail)

Wagner: Prose draft of Parsifal

Sangreal… Sang Real… San Greal… Royal Blood… Holy Grail

Dan Brown: The Da Vinci Code, Chapter 60

Returning to Philip K Dick and Valis, the key to the Parsifal connection here lies in Gnosticism. Hopefully most people will already have some idea what this is, but a very brief (and inadequate) definition might be something like: “Gnosticism is a form of Christianity that views the physical world as an illusion that conceals true reality”. As such, Gnosticism has parallels in the Indian religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, and in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Gnosticism is an important theme in Parsifal, The Matrix and above all in the novels of Philip K Dick. I’ve already mentioned that Parsifal ends with the words “The redeemer redeemed”. Dick picks up on this in Chapter 8 of Valis:

The savior saved idea is Gnostic in origin. How did it get into Parsifal?

The one-word answer to Dick’s question is “Schopenhauer”! The same is true of another question that Dick raised back in Chapter 3 of Valis. Picking up on a line from Act 1 of Parsifal (“You see, my son, here time turns into space”), Dick says:

Wagner… died in 1883, long before Hermann Minkowski postulated four dimensional space-time. The source-basis for Parsifal consisted of Celtic legends, and Wagner’s research into Buddhism for his never-written opera about the Buddha to be called The Victors. Where did Richard Wagner get the notion that time could turn into space? Well, here’s a letter that Wagner wrote way back in 1860 that refers to space and time:

All the terrible tragedy of life would be attributable to our dislocation in time and space; but since time and space are merely our way of perceiving things, but otherwise have no reality, even the greatest tragic pain must be explicable to those who are truly clear-sighted as no more than the error of the individual. [Letter from Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, dated August 1860]

“… time and space are merely our way of perceiving things, but otherwise have no reality.” To me, that seems an amazing insight for a mid-19th century European. It was still an amazing idea eighty years later when A E Van Vogt put it in his Null-A novels!

Both Wagner in Parsifal, and Philip K Dick in Valis, refer to a supposed etymology of the name Parsifal as “pure fool”. It’s clear that Dick realised the etymology was spurious, but Wagner really believed it:

“Parsi fal” means: parsi – think of the fire-loving Parsees – “pure”; fal means “mad” in a higher sense, in other words a man without erudition, but one of genius … [Letter from Wagner to Judith Gautier, dated Nov 1877]

A more generally accepted etymology for Parsifal is from the old French for “pierce the veil” – which strikes me as being even more relevant in the Gnostic sense: Piercing the veil of illusion…

Percival (Perceval, Percheval, Parsifal…) from Old French “pierce the veil” (perce le voile). [http://www.babynamesdirectory.com]

“Pure fool” or “pierce the veil” – both are relevant to Wagner’s hero, and to any number of Philip K Dick’s protagonists. Here’s a quotation from Dick’s widow, Tessa:

The theme which runs most consistently through Phil’s work is that of Parsifal, the “wise fool”… He appears in Divine Invasion as Manny (Emmanuel), in Valis as Horselover Fat searching for the saviour. [Tessa Dick, quoted at http://www.philipkdickfans.com%5D

So Philip K Dick was influenced by Parsifal. As with so many subjects that interested him, he analysed it very carefully, and ended up concluding that it didn’t make sense (maybe he missed Wagner’s caveat that it was all meant to be symbolic!). Dick being Dick, he assumed that if he didn’t understand Parsifal, then no-one else would either. Not even God. There’s a wonderful image in Valis where Dick pictures Wagner trying to get into heaven: I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven: “You have to let me in,” he says. “I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?” And they answer, “Well, we read it and it makes no sense.” SLAM.

[Philip K Dick: Valis, Chapter 8]

Works Cited

Monsalvathttp://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/concommon.htm (a huge website devoted to Parsifal) Bryan Magee: Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001)

Parzifal says, “told ya so.”

 

Gods, Goddesses, Archtypes and Being Whole

Know Thyself! Excellent advice and thank you Plato/Socrates. What’s that journey look like in our time. Barry Beck as some excellent observations.

====================

Ancient Archetypes and Modern Manifestations — The Goddess

by Barry Beck

The Ancients knew more about us than we do about them.

I would like to discuss the notion of the Goddess, not as a quaint superstitious half-forgotten relic of ancient civilizations, but as a key to understanding and rediscovering a forgotten aspect of history and as a framework for re-establishing circulation to and from a lost part of our Psyches and our Selves.

We have had perhaps 5000 years of a patriarchal God, but previous to the cultures of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, Hindus, Chinese and Celts, there is great evidence that matriarchal based civilizations existed where those peoples later located. An agricultural revolution replacing the hunter-gatherer societies may in part account for this transformation. These earlier civilizations worshipped the Goddess, not as a power from above or outside of ourselves, but as an externalization of interior states and a projection of aspects of our Psyche, Soul or Self; and as a personification of Energy that shapes and maintains the Earth. [But see Hayden, 1998, for an archaeological perspective. Ed.]

I will describe the nature of two mythological frameworks and how I relate them to transitions that occurred within myself. An example of changes that took place in our mythology after the patriarchal conquest can be seen in the figure of Athene or Athena and in the symbol of the first woman whom we call Eve. Athena, as she originally appeared, represented wisdom and knowledge in their purest form. She was a fully armed warrior as well as a herald of agriculture and architecture. She was a personification of civilization. After the patriarchal revolution, beauty and wisdom remained as her attributes, but she became subservient to Zeus and other male gods.

Following the lead of such people as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Dr. Jean Houston sees mythology as a coded DNA or a cartography of the Psyche. She writes of how Athena changed from independent woman to Daddy’s girl. Zeus metaphorically swallows wisdom and Athena is reborn from Zeus’s head. Houston also sees Homer’s Odyssey as symbolic of a patriarchal invasion that occurred between five and eight thousand years ago. Ulysses has essentially conquered his world, but as he slowly returns home, he is being developed and educated by feminine archetypes such as Athena, Circe, Calypso, and other assorted sirens, nymphs, fates, amazons and the nine muses, all gateways to the archetypes. They recognize he has conquered the surface world, but quietly, often without his discernment, they are teaching him new models of wisdom and knowledge. With no more external enemies the man is given a choice of either suppressing these new qualities or harmonizing them within himself and his world. This period of gestation or internalization or seeming non-activity is in reality one of his most creative.

Dr. June Singer has rediscovered a Gnostic creation story from the first century with sources that pre-date Genesis. In this tale, Eve is not initially punished for bringing a certain type of knowledge to the world, but later some angels, jealous of her power and influence, attack her. Eve’s spirit flies away but her physical Self remains on the earth. This story has a parallel in the split between the physical and spiritual that can take place in child or spousal abuse. Eve’s spirit in effect says, “I cannot stay here; I am not welcome; I will return when I am again needed and accepted.” But for now, she is wounded and must protect herself. In the patriarchal Genesis, women and men alike are condemned because Eve has sinned by experiencing and introducing unacceptable and forbidden knowledge.

Our myths, gradually over centuries, become unconscious and can be remodeled to justify a social change that has already taken place. Characteristics and attributes that were feminine are either co-opted and taken over by men (such as Athena’s strength and military aptitude), become subservient to or denigrated by men (women’s intuition and sensitivity) or are distorted to become evil traits (witchcraft and nature customs being chief examples). One would think childbirth would at least be one talent left to women, yet even this trait is appropriated by male archetypes for the birth of important individuals in mythology: Athena is born from Zeus’s head; Eve is born from Adam’s rib. It is as if the power to give life is too important to be left to women.

I would argue that in taking the Goddess seriously, we are getting twice the God. We’re not losing a Son, but gaining a Daughter. In my own experience, I discovered that characteristics within myself such as logic, rationalism, linear thinking and worldly success led to a kind of dead end. A part of me was oppressing another element. Freeing the entire Self and finding new ways of thinking and finding solutions opened up new avenues for me. It was easier to harmonize, organize and individuate all aspects of myself.

Dr. Jean Bolen, author of Gods in Everyman and Goddessees in Everywoman, writes that “relying on one half of ourselves can be impoverishing and result in an experience void of emotional meaning and lacking in full spiritual dimension.” This is true of each of us individually as well as for society as a whole.

So to use the symbolism of the Gnostic creation story, the Goddess, like Eve’s spirit, was attacked and wounded and had to leave the earth for a while, but perhaps now that we are ready, she will return to help us complete our psycho-spiritual Selves fully.

© 1999 Barry Beck

“Know ThySELF” says Parzifal–and s/he means it.

 

Loftiness of Rock: The Authentic Popular Mystery-Religion of the Late 20th Century

This post is self explanatory. Gnosis often breaks through in the midst of everyday experience as well as structures that have emerged into our culture like Rock Music or Entheogenes.

========================

Loftiness of Rock: The Authentic Popular Mystery-Religion of the Late 20th Century

Contents

Acid Rock as 2-level mystery religion. 1

High vs. Low Stonerism.. 2

Rock, the authentic mystery religion of 20th Century. 3

Heavy Rock religion as ongoing conversation among poets. 3

Misguided critique of “seriousness” in Rock. 5

“Seriousness” in Rock and definition of  “modern day  Christianity” 6

Rave Ascension: Youth, Techno Culture and Religion. 7

 

Acid Rock as 2-level mystery religion

Acid rock is the authentic mystery religion of our time.  One lyrical approach, the non-mystery approach or lesser-mystery approach, is to write lyrics that are obvious allusions to the entheogenic loose- cognition state.  The higher or more extreme mystery approach is to write lyrics that to the uninitiated, appear to be completely unrelated to the entheogenic loose-cognition state, but contain dense subtle allusions to that state for those who are initiated and can recognize the set of allusions and double-entendres.

In this sense, the Rush song “Red Barchetta” is a more sophisticated and has pure mystery lyrics, as opposed to the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” or Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?”, which are explicitly about the altered state and thus cannot reveal any hidden meaning as “Red Barchetta” can.  This suggests a distinction between plain “Acid Rock” and “Acid Mystery Rock”.  Rush is the best example of the latter.  The Beatles did some of both; in the Rubber Soul era, their songs claimed to be simply about pop romance, but had a mostly hidden layer of allusions to the altered state.

Another category, of “Acid Baffling Rock” is needed for lyrics that are simply puzzling, strange, arbitrary, and meaningless to the uninitiated, like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but fully allude to the altered state phenomena such as ego death.  This is the distinction between:

o  Obvious allegory with obvious meaning (Acid Rock).  Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Eight Miles High, Are You Experienced?

o  Hidden allegory with contradictory surface and hidden meaning (Acid Mystery Rock).  Red Barchetta, Chemistry, Help!

o  Obvious allegory with puzzling meaning (Acid Baffling Rock).  Bohemian Rhapsody.

felix wrote:

>So are you saying that the greater the buildup of literally believing the deliberate lie, the more profound the revelation of the entheogenic experience will be? Both in the Jesus mysteries and in acid rock, such that it will embrace most every aspect of life in which you’ve been tricked into taking things literally, and the transformation will be complete?

That’s not what I meant to assert, but I largely agree with that.  Earliest Christianity may have been predominantly esoteric, experiential, and mythic, rather than exoteric, creedal, and literalist.  In that case, the fictional stories about Jesus and company were taught to candidates only as preliminary stories — same as myths of Demeter.  The intensity of revelation was not due to the intensity of false literalist belief in the Jesus stories, but just due to the great difference between the uninitiated mind and the mind that has experienced loose cognition and the concomitant realm of altered-state experiences and insights about self, personal power, moral agency, and time.

These days, in addition, we have the history-shattering revelation that Jesus is mainly or solely a fictional character — collapsing two millenia of literalist error.  But the main revelation of Christianity is not that literalism is wrong — it’s that our assumed control agency and power to decide or change the future is wrong.

In the LSD-soaked 1970s, it was a moderate revelation to discover altered-state allusions in Rush lyrics, but no great surprise.  In the 1990s, blinded by the history-suppressing sham drug war, we gained an additional degree of astonishment.  Not only did we discover the altered-state allusions in the lyrics of 1970s Rush albums, some young and culturally over-sheltered Rush listeners also were stunned and surprised to consider that Rush may have used LSD — a fact that is anything but a surprise to those who know the cultural context, but comes as a distinctly counterintuitive, taboo, and quasi-paradoxical revelation to the poor propagandized, deceived young students who were subjected to the lies the schools told in the 1990s.  Rush was a heavy rock band in the 70s.

Therefore we should assume they did drugs, on that basis alone, unless we have really good reason to think that, for some reason, they are the only band who didn’t (which would be very much against the trend).  It would be amazing if Rush *didn’t* use LSD in the 70s, being a heavy rock band.  But today’s worse than know-nothing kids have been told the opposite of the truth, they’ve been assaulted with lies upon lies.  They think that Rush is sophisticated and “therefore” didn’t use drugs.

They have been told that down is up and up is down; it’s been hammered into them.  Not only is it a revelation in waiting for them that Rush alludes to mystic phenomena, and that Rush used LSD as well as cannabis, and to a religious degree, but also, that their education about drugs has been a steady diet of lies upon lies.  It is disturbing that everyone considers Rush to be philosophy rock and *therefore* must have shunned drugs.  The opposite is true — the greatest philosophy rock is bound to preach the true mystery religion.

High vs. Low Stonerism

>>You have entirely different ideas compared to ‘tradition’ theorists about what the esoteric core of religion was: drugs, vs, at best, some sort of meditation, contemplation, or Jungian “active imagination”, which you consider mostly a placebo, why it was hidden, why it was lost, who has the secret now (science and stoners).

To a large extent, Science immediately saw the good sense in the entheogen theory, ever since that theory was formulated.  Computer science is strongly entheogen-influenced.  However, this demonstrates the relation between de facto use of entheogens (and entheogen-positive views) on the part of individuals, versus the official stance of fields or industries: don’t expect any official statements on the part of Science or Computer Science that entheogens are of greatest relevance.

It’s not yet the view of Science that religion is essentially entheogen-derived.  That’s a likely conclusion as entheogen scholarship continues.  Consider the various motives Science has to portray religion as entheogen-derived or as not entheogen-derived.

In Stonerism, as in any field or genre, there is both Low Stonerism and High Stonerism.  Ozzy Osbourne and Rush (even more so) are representatives of High Stonerism.  High Times magazine usually caters to Low Stonerism, while Cannabis Culture is more geared toward High Stonerism.  Psychedelic Illuminations, renamed TRP, renamed Trip, is geared toward High Stonerism.

A typical Stonerist move is to deliberately conjoin low and high, per the Ken Kesey/Merry Pranksters approach.  Osbourne’s Diary of a Madman deliberately explores the range, progressing from innocent adolescent “Flying High Again” through the breakdown of control of Little Dolls, the dark night of Tonight and SATO, to a heavy metalesque dark pensive conclusion in “Diary of a Madman” — overshadowed, however, by the real conclusion, Ozzy’s glorification and crucifixion in Christ on the back cover.

Acid-influenced Rock is the authentic initiatory mystery religion of the late modern era, because it combines muse-inspired poetic lyrics, music, gatherings, encoded allusions to mystic-state phenomena, and genuine ‘good wine’ — entheogens on tap, particularly the combination of cannabis and lysergic acid.

The high level of any two fields is closer than the high and low version of a particular field.  Ozzy is in High Stonerism and Mystery Religions are High Religion.  Modern existentialism and Psychology are merely Low Philosophy and Low Psychology.  Therefore Ozzy Osbourne and Mystery Religions, both being High, must be grouped together, separate from typical 20th century Philosophy and Psychology, which are Low.

It’s ironic that the uninformed accept grouping Rush with Mystery Religions, while banishing Ozzy to the lower realms.  Ozzy and Rush are both firmly based in High Art — the acid-rock mystery religion — whatever their relative artistic merits.  Any praise of the religious inspriation of Rush must be granted as well to Ozzy and the other acid-oriented Rock artists, who form a tradition, a genre — they are not at all isolated lone individuals.

Acid-influenced rock lyric allusions are a collectively shared language, consciously spoken among the lyricists and understood, recognized, and respected by a significant portion of the audience.  Similarly, I am not alone in my interpretation of the lyrical allusions; it’s a matter of a group of people who read the lyrics as I do, versus a group that denies the correctness of such a reading — it’s two views, not my own view held in isolation, versus the view held by the rest of the world.

Rock, the authentic mystery religion of 20th Century

Michael wrote:

>>The religious banqueting associations were like small Rock or Punk Rock clubs, against the Prog Rock arena shows of the mass-scale mystery initiations.  Mithraism was like a large network of intimately tiny Rock clubs.

Frank wrote:

>This is a great way to look at it.  It can also be a bit depressing.  If Christianity got to its arena rock phase around the time of Augustine, us gnostic types have barely gotten out of our garage band startup!

The ancient towering powerful Catholic church is largely an illusion; it was but a recent mouse.

Today I found that Erik Davis a similar description in the book TechGnosis:

“… the freak scene would never have spread without technology … Especially the electric guitar. … the rock concert had become the hedonic agora of the counterculture; musicians dove headfirst into the electromagnetic imaginary, transforming … electrical effects like feedback and distortion into ferocious transcendental chaos. … Combined with … light shows and [entheogens originating from the Establishment] … these kundalini-tweaking soundstorms staged electrified Eleusinian mysteries …”  p. 145

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

Erik Davis

Currently pages 2-29 are available online here

1999

Rank 70K (popular)

http://www.techgnosis.com

Heavy Rock religion as ongoing conversation among poets

Allusions to acid mystic state phenomena in practice amounted to a kind of ongoing conversation among Rock groups.  Not only must you study an artist’s later song in the light of their earlier songs; you must include the songs (and visual album and concert art) by other previous Rock hierophants as well.

What’s greatly needed is a chronological listing of acid-rock lyrics, starting with Help! by John Lennon, toward finding which acid-alluding song lyrics led in the next year or two to thematic variations from another artist in response.

>>Do you think that the artists not only compose lyrics in an altered mental state, but compose the music itself in an altered state so that the music itself has deeper meaning while tripping?

Examples of music that is composed to allude to the phenomena of the intense mystic altered state is the two symphonic build-ups in Day in the Life by the Beatles, the ascending suspenseful phasing and violins in Cheap Trick: World Turns Round (on Dream Police), and the haunting chords and erratic heartbeat at the end of Cygnus X1.

Poetic music is better than electronica (acid rave), because words convey allusions more complexly than just trippy sounds; words carry meaning that can unfold and blossom in a state-dependent fashion.

I have heard that it is standard practice among Classic Rock lyricists to compose poetry as the ancients did, in the inebriated visionary state.  This only makes sense.

Classic Rock in general, by definition, is written and performed within the psychotomimetic THC plus LSD state of consciousness.  Pot with acid is the standard religion of Heavy Rock; pot with acid is the Heavy Rock religion.  Rush are only differentiated by their higher than average devotion to the Heavy Rock religion.

>>I happened to listen to Rush while tripping on acid.  I was at a friend’s house while listening to Rush and because of the messages I thought I was hearing, I swore up and down for years that either my friend had rigged his stereo and computer equipment or that Rush had encoded their music.  It is amazing to see that others have experienced this.

This unfolding effect is known and deliberately played upon by the Heavy Rock artists and poets.

>>The frequency of the allusions convinces you that that Rush has encoded their music.  Could the frequency of the alleged allusions seem to increase simply because the artist writes more intelligently than another, mediocre, artist?

That is hypothetically possible but pointless and not the case.  All the bands tripped on pot with acid all the time, and like historical mystics, some did a better job of it than others.

>>Is it that Peart encodes and the acid savvy listener decodes, or is it that Peart writes very creatively, with many metaphors, and that this is fodder for an altered mind?

Peart encodes many metaphors deliberately alluding to the phenomena of the pot-with-acid state of cognitive processing.  He is skilled at maximizing this acid encoding/decoding effect richly, in a skill development feedback loop.

>>I remember experiencing the same things watching Star Trek.  Any info on this?

Moving pictures are not my specialty, but there is some interest in the subject of acid mysticism allusions in movies, among other researchers.

>>Very few fans of respective bands know about the double meaning of the lyrics.

That’s uncertain.  Many fans have at least experienced the extended meaning, even if they retain a far hazier grasp than the heavy-tripping poets.

>Even most people familiar with both (i.e., band and acid) would laugh in your face at the mere idea of it.

Evidence so far contradicts that assertion.  Around 2/3 of the people I hear from who are familiar with the bands and with acid heartily agree with the systematization I’ve pulled together.  Around 2/3 who so qualified, agree.  It’s not enough to be somewhat familiar with the albums, or to have tripped just a handful of times.  The more one has tripped and has done so with the albums playing, the more one is likely to agree with the entheogen theory of Heavy Rock lyrics.  The terms ‘Heavy’ and ‘Rock’ function practically as code-words for tripping on acid.

>>It’s obviously not everyone’s favorite hobby to do high-dose trips. The first one you do with a *really* naive mindset regarding what will happen to you. [will blow you away disturbingly?]  Even if you are informed.  On the other hand, this naivety may in some sense be useful/necessary, as it is doubtful that people would embark upon a journey so harsh.

>>Nowadays I’m really rather timid going beyond medium-strength trips. I know that it delivers some of the best moments one can possibly experience but it always comes with the price. I guess here come rituals handy: They provide for a preset occasion to trip and one “just does it” without having to struggle hours about if one really should do it or not.

Poets and hierophants: We trip hard so you don’t have to.

We Will Rock You

Misguided critique of “seriousness” in Rock

>>I hope I don’t discover that Rush is taking their own lyrics way too seriously, but I guess a lot of the art rock bands of the 70’s are guilty of that.

Criticizing “taking lyrics too seriously” gives a feeling of superioriority, but that’s often a sign of incomprehension of the meaning in lyrics.  Do people really want to limit Rock to the mindless Boogie Rock of the self-titled Rush album, or the Ramones as the ideal scope of Punk thematic materials?

It’s not immediately clear what “taking their own lyrics too seriously” means.  Generally, the most standard single theme or motive of Classic Rock (1960s and 70s Rock from Freakbeat to Psychedelic Rock, Acid Rock, Heavy Rock, Heavy Metal, then Metal) is to reflect the phenomena of the LSD altered state.  Consider Heavy Rock, such as Queen’s song Bohemian Rhapsody or Rush’s song No One at the Bridge.

Punk Rock is “guilty” of the same supposed crime.  For all of its *talk* about offering a “less pretentious and serious” approach to Rock, Punk treated politics every bit as seriously as Classic Rock treated the LSD altered state and its phenomena.

>>Ozzy Osbourne definitely is not guilty of that.

No album takes its lyrics more seriously than Ozzy Osbourne’s album Diary of a Madman.  Similarly, Sabotage is also insanely serious and grandiose.

http://www.egodeath.com/sablyrics.htm

Listen as well to Osbourne’s song Revelation (Mother Earth):

Mother please forgive them

For they know not what they do

Looking back in history’s books

It seems it’s nothing new

Oh! Let my mother live

Heaven is for heroes

And hell is full of fools

Stupidity, no will to live

They’re breaking God’s own rules

Please let my mother live

Father, of all creation

I think we’re all going wrong

The course they’re taking

Seems to be breaking

And it won’t take too long

Children of the future

Watching empires fall

Madness the cup they drink from

Self destruction the toll

I had a vision, l saw the world burn

And the seas had turned red

The sun had fallen, the final curtain

In the land of the dead

Mother, please show the children

Before it’s too late

To fight each other, there’s no-one winning

We must fight all the hate

Rock doesn’t get any more serious and grandiose and cosmic than that.  So much for “taking their own lyrics … seriously … Ozzy Osbourne definitely is not guilty of that.”

“Seriousness” in Rock and definition of  “modern day  Christianity”

>>I started on this journey by listening to and researching the Beatles who tried to capture the feeling one gets from transcendental meditation and eastern religion in their music.  Of course, the acid experience is a huge part of that experience.

The music of Ozzy and Beatles has much in common — playful taboo crossing and the mystic altered state, mystery-religion, cosmic gnostic footloose profundity, ultimate concerns transcendently freely mixed with British wacky absurd humor.

Metal such as Iron Maiden and Metallica can cover only half the themes or mood of the intense mystic altered state; that genre as an expressive medium is restricted.  Mainstream acid-oriented Rock can cover more ground in exploring the world of the intense mystic altered state, because it does not have to restrict itself to constant heaviness.

Ozzy/Sabbath is ultimately superior to Metallica as an expressive style because Ozzy/Sabbath has always had full room for humor and light beauty, unlike the Metal genre.  Much of the Iron Maiden lyrics seem to have their inspired quality handicapped by a rigid rule of always having to be dark, negative, hardcore.

>>Perhaps my critique of “seriousness” in Rock comes from the technical and academic nature of the posts on this newsgroup.

http://www.egodeath.com/#AlteredStateLyrics

It doesn’t get any more straightforward than this set of Web pages.  An explanation of allusions to the mystic altered state is potentially as straightforward and explicit than this.  Where can people find a less “technical and academic” explanation of Rock mysticism than this?  The present posting would as well, and as absurdly, be called “technical and academic”.

This discussion group is technical and academic compared to postings saying just “Dude, too much tripping and my soul’s worn thin.”  One step simpler than this discussion group will land you in the public newsgroups.

If you hate academic bluster, you’ll love to hate the existing books that fail to even see the presence of primary religious experiencing in Heavy Rock.  The allusions go right over their heads, so we end up with the familiar combination of sophisticated-sounding blustery explanation, that completely misses the essence, producing a study that pretends to be about certain Rock lyrics, but really ends up being about the ideas embraced by Academia.

I would like to search more of the books about Rock for real insight — not just saying that bands used LSD, not just saying that Lucy… is about LSD, but spelling out the allusions to altered-state phenomena in songs far and wide.  The books I’ve seen have nothing even remotely like that.

Book lists:

Rock as philosophical mystery-religion

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2PTKEDT3LYDKZ

Some of these books on Heavy Rock *might* provide insight.  I wouldn’t count on it, but look up “acid”, “mystic”, “lsd”, “psychedelics”, and “drugs” in the indexes.

Rush books (Rock group)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2RLOST1ROMDCA

>>I recently dropped out of a Master’s Program, so I am in an anti-academic frame of mind at the moment.  I have more faith in my own intuition and intellectual efforts than in institutional knowledge, much to my own detriment.

Reading today’s quarter-baked scholarship is a necessary evil.  I have to do a major mental transformation to extract value out of most books.

The biggest mistake of so-called “higher education” is modern ignorance of the use of visionary plants throughout human history.  That fault may be laid on academia rather than outside it.

>>I have relied heavily on the works of Joseph Campbell for a roadmap of my journey.

From what I’ve read so far, Campbell seems more insightful than Jung.  The problem is the whole modern Psychology paradigm, which distorts its own field as much as shining light on it.  Both of them are grounded in the era before the late 1960s, and therefore they are almost wholly ignorant of the explanatory solution provided by visionary plants.

Scholarship in psychology and symbols will eventually be divided into before and after the era of the rediscovery of entheogens, which had a turning point around 1972.  By 1972, any scholar of myth-religion-mysticism who was not aware of the entheogen theory of religion is guilty of professional incompetence and inexcusable oblivious ignorance.  Prior to around 1972, theories of myth-religion-mysticism can be excused for ignorance of the entheogen solution to their questions — not so after about 1972.

Jung on Christianity

Murray Stein (Introduction), Carl Gustav Jung

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691006970

>>Campbell has become popular through his populist approach to mythology and Jungian psychology.  I am trying to reconcile my familiarity with Campbell to “modern day Christianity”, which I define the Christian Church as an institution, which deems salvation is achieved primarily through works rather than faith.

Official Christianity is a system of salvation through works, with a veneer of salvation through faith and regeneration through the Holy Spirit laid on top.  Because the official Church in fact lacks the Holy Spirit, the masses fall back onto striving for salvation through works.

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor (covers Christian myth-religion, fine content)

Joseph Campbell

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1577312023

Oct. 2001

Rave Ascension: Youth, Techno Culture and Religion

I have written about lyrical allusions to the phenomena of the mystic altered state in various entheogen-inspired rock genres.  This popular entheogen-oriented music tradition began with psychedelic rock, lived on much more strongly than people realize in progressive rock and heavy rock, including Queen, Rush, Metallica, and Slayer, as well as the Grateful Dead, and now lives on in the rave culture.

>From the main Theory Notes section of my site:

http://www.egodeath.com/mcpnotes.htm#lttatarwmsp

http://www.egodeath.com/mcpnotes.htm#xtocid15333

>From the Lyrics section of my site:

http://www.egodeath.com/#lyrics

http://www.egodeath.com/acidlyrics.htm

>From my Amptone site:

http://www.amptone.com/overview.htm — find section: Amp Tone and the Experience of Ego Death (moved to Egodeath site)

We should also check to see what Erik Davis has to say about the intersection of psychedelic rock, rave culture, mysticism, and technology.

>From the Visionary Plants discussion List:

Dr St John is looking for contributions at a post-graduate level, either novel or previously published. Check with him. The Project may be published by Routledge Research.

The deadline is 17th September 2001.

Contact Graham directly at:

g.stjohn at unimelb.edu.au

_______________________________________________________________________

Call for submissions to a new anthology –

Rave Ascension: Youth, Techno Culture and Religion

To be edited by Graham St John

“…dance parties have transmuted the role that organised religion once had to lift us onto the sacramental and supramental plane”. Such was the thinking of Goa veteran and self-styled ‘trancetheologian’, Ray Castle in a paean to the power of rave in his 1995 communion with Eugene ENRG (aka DJ Krusty): http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/metanet/meld1.html

Despite its diasporic fragmentation and hybridisation throughout the nineties, the dance party rave – involving masses of youth dancing all-night to a syncopated electronic rhythm mixed by DJs – maintains rapturous popularity in the West. Commonly accorded effects ranging from personal ‘healing’ or replenishment, to transformations on social, cultural or political scales, the rave – from clubland, to outdoor doof, to technomadic festival – is a hyper-crucible of contemporary youth spirituality. The question thus arises:

* What is the role of the technocultural rave in the spiritual life of contemporary youth? *

Emerging in London in 1988 and subsequently exported around the world, the rave has proliferated and mutated alongside associated music (electronic) and body (‘ecstasy’) technologies. Throughout the nineties, vast numbers of western youth attached primary significance to raving and post-rave experiences. Regularly regarded by participants as a site of ‘self-transcendence’, a kind of temporary utopia, the rave grew prevalent in the experience of urban youth. With the combined stimulus of electronic musics, psychotropic lighting and chemical alterants, young novices and experienced habitues transcended the mundane in converted warehouses, wilderness areas, beaches, deserts and streets.

Participants and observers have variously reported ‘communion’, ‘telepathy’, ‘trance’ states, ‘ecstasy’ or the ‘sacred’ along with a transcendence of subject, ethnic or gender categories at rave and post-rave events. Producers of rave soundscapes and visual components (from video images to décor) reportedly possess ‘shamanic’ characteristics. Events are often deemed ‘tribal’ celebrations – even ‘corroborees’. And, experienced habitues of dance champion psychedelic ‘sacraments’, sometimes claimed to accelerate the reception of esoteric knowledge.

Yet a torrent of inquiry issues from our initial question. Is the rave a nascent rite de passage – and, if so, what is its telos? What is its level and quality of efficacy? Is it a ritual of communion, a mass ‘return’ to a ‘womb’ which sees co-inhabitants secure in a nutrient rich and numinous pre-separation stage, or an anomic post-partum ‘dead-zone’ catering for ‘escapist’ desires and tragic careers in over-expenditure? An ‘oceanic experience’ or a kind of prolonged youth suicide? Does the rave or post-rave more closely approximate a Church, Disney World™ or a “detention camp for youth” (Reynolds, Energy Flash 424). Has the cyber-chemical-millenarianism which flourished under the roof of the original acid house been domesticated – the rapture contained and smothered in regulated and commodified leisure sites? Or has its technospiritual fervour been smuggled away into furtive temporary autonomous zones where it percolates still?

Calling for submission from scholars of contemporary religion, dance ethnologists, sociologists and other cultural observers, this anthology seeks to answer such questions, and in the process unravel the socio-cultural religious dimensions of rave and rave-derived phenomena. Though various commentators have initiated research on this youth cultural moment, Rave Ascension will be a venue devoted to such research.

Contributors might address one or more of the following themes:

– Rave as New Age religion. Discussion could transpire on rave as manifestation of New Age techno-spirituality. The presence of esotericism – eg gnosticism – in the dance party space, music and mythos – would be a worthy subject of analysis.

– Rave as ritual (communion, rite of passage, potlatch, therapeutic). Subjects of analysis and documentation could include Earthdance described as ‘a global dance party for world peace and healing’; techno-utopian festivals like Burning Man; or outdoor doofs of the ‘Goa Trance’ tradition.

– Rave as TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone): Contributors might address the influence of inspired anarcho-mystic Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) upon the ‘rave movement’ and techno-art communities.

– Techno-spirituality: Rave’s location in ‘postmodern’ technospiritual developments. Relevant themes for discussion include techno-futurism; and the use of the Internet by ‘cybergnostic’ rave communities.

– Psychedelics and dance: the role of entheogens (Ecstasy), LSD and other chemical alterants in the dance-space. For example, the work of Nicholas Saunders or the nuances and implications of the interfacing of body and cyber technologies – cyberdelics – could be addressed.

– ‘Techno-paganism’: from Fraser Clark’s Shamanarchy to the Drop Bass Network’s interest in Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan.

– Comparisons of the rave experience with the ritual experience of non-western cultures – eg. in relation to similarities in music, repetitive percussive rhythm and/or psychotropic stimuli.

– Electro-primitivism. The appropriation/sampling of the exotic ‘Other’ in rave performances, symbolism/décor and electronic music. Processes and implications.

– Trance: dance, music, visual effects and the trance state. For example, Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality and the ‘techno-mass’ would be relevant.

– Techno-shamanism: DJs as ‘engineer-poets’, technicians of ecstasy, or high priests?

– Raving as ‘consumer spirituality’. Is the purported religiosity or social strengthening of raving improved or threatened by the consumer capitalism with which it is implicated?

– Rave as presexual/pregendered paradise – the temporary androgynous zone.

– Raves and Christianity: The fusion of Episcopalian services, vicar V ravey’s Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield , and Club X organised by Billy Graham’s Youth for Christ are relevant high interest topics.

– Victor Turner: The usefulness of Victor Turner’s processual theory – including ‘spontaneous communitas’, the ‘cultural drama’ and liminoidal ‘play’ – to the study of rave and rave-derived events.

– Michel Maffesoli: rave as exemplary ‘orgiastic’ or ’empathetic’ sociality particular to ‘neo-tribalism’.

– George Bataille: The value of Bataille’s ideas on eroticism and trangression to dance.

– Dance, corporeality and place: the establishment of somatic connectedness to place through dance.

– Technoculture and ecologism: How may ‘rave technologies’ be mobilised to facilitate or mediate consciousness of the natural world? Do dance events possess a role in (re)producing ethical, eco-conscious individuals and communities?

I am open to suggestion on other relevant themes and lines of inquiry.

Routledge Publishers Research have expressed interest in the project. If interested, please submit (email) an abstract of no more than 300 words to Graham St John by Sep 17, 2001. Chapters are requested to be around 7000 words in length.

g.stjohn at unimelb.edu.au

Graham St John is a Visiting Fellow at the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne and is the editor of FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor, an OzAuthors/Pluto Press co-production available from Sep/Oct 2001

http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/freeNRG/

Parzifal says, “rock on”!

 

Imaginary and the Imaginal

Some insights from Henry Corbin who insight (Gnosis) turned on an apprehension of the Imaginary and the Imaginal–an approach to what constitutes Reality!

=======================================

Mundus Imaginalis,
or the Imaginary and the Imaginal

by Henri Corbin

 

In offering the two Latin words mundus imaginalis as the title of this discussion, I intend to treat a precise order of reality corresponding to a precise mode of perception, because Latin terminology gives the advantage of providing us with a technical and fixed point of reference, to which we can compare the various more-or-less irresolute equivalents that our modern Western languages suggest to us.

I will make an immediate admission. The choice of these two words was imposed upon me some time ago, because it was impossible for me, in what I had to translate or say, to be satisfied with the word imaginary. This is by no means a criticism addressed to those of us for whom the use of the language constrains recourse to this word, since we are trying together to reevaluate it in a positive sense. Regardless of our efforts, though, we cannot prevent the term imaginary, in current usage that is not deliberate, from being equivalent to signifying unreal, something that is and remains outside of being and existence-in brief, something utopian. I was absolutely obliged to find another term because, for many years, I have been by vocation and profession an interpreter of Arabic and Persian texts, the purposes of which I would certainly have betrayed if I had been entirely and simply content-even with every possible precaution-with the term imaginary. I was absolutely obliged to find another term if I did not want to mislead the Western reader that it is a matter of uprooting long-established habits of thought, in order to awaken him to an order of things, the sense of which it is the mission of our colloquia at the “Society of Symbolism” to rouse.

In other words, if we usually speak of the imaginary as the unreal, the utopian, this must contain the symptom of something. In contrast to this something, we may examine briefly together the order of reality that I designate as mundus imaginalis, and what our theosophers in Islam designate as the “eighth climate”; we will then examine the organ that perceives this reality, namely, the imaginative consciousness, the cognitive Imagination; and finally, we will present several examples, among many others, of course, that suggest to us the topography of these interworlds, as they have been seen by those who actually have been there.

1. “NA-KOJA-ABAD” OR THE “EIGHTH CLIMATE” I have just mentioned the word utopian. It is a strange thing, or a decisive example, that our authors use a term in Persian that seems to be its linguistic calque: Na-kojd-Abad, the “land of No-where.” This, however, is something entirely different from a utopia.

Let us take the very beautiful tales-simultaneously visionary tales and tales of spiritual initiation-composed in Persian by Sohravardi, the young shaykh who, in the twelfth century, was the “reviver of the theosophy of ancient Persia” in Islamic Iran. Each time, the visionary finds himself, at the beginning of the tale, in the presence of a supernatural figure of great beauty, whom the visionary asks who he is and from where he comes. These tales essentially illustrate the experience of the gnostic, lived as the personal history of the Stranger, the captive who aspires to return home.

At the beginning of the tale that Sohravardi entitles “The Crimson Archangel,”1 the captive, who has just escaped the surveillance of his jailers, that is, has temporarily left the world of sensory experience, finds himself in the desert in the presence of a being whom he asks, since he sees in him all the charms of adolescence, “0 Youth! where do you come from?” He receives this reply: “What? I am the first-born of the children of the Creator [in gnostic terms, the Protoktistos, the First-Created] and you call me a youth?” There, in this origin, is the mystery of the crimson color that clothes his appearance: that of a being of pure Light whose splendor the sensory world reduces to the crimson of twilight. “I come from beyond the mountain of Qaf… It is there that you were yourself at the beginning, and it is there that you will return when you are finally rid of your bonds.”

The mountain of Qaf is the cosmic mountain constituted from summit to summit, valley to valley, by the celestial Spheres that are enclosed one inside the other. What, then, is the road that leads out of it? How long is it? “No matter how long you walk,” he is told, “it is at the point of departure that you arrive there again,” like the point of the compass returning to the same place. Does this involve simply leaving oneself in order to attain oneself) Not exactly. Between the two, a great event will have changed everything; the self that is found there is the one that is beyond the mountain of Qaf a superior self, a self “in the second person.” It will have been necessary, like Khezr (or Khadir, the mysterious prophet, the eternal wanderer, Elijah or one like him) to bathe in the Spring of Life. “He who has found the meaning of True Reality has arrived at that Spring. When he emerges from the Spring, he has achieved the Aptitude that makes him like a balm, a drop of which you distill in the hollow of your hand by holding it facing the sun, and which then passes through to the back of your hand. If you are Khezr, you also may pass without difficulty through the mountain of Qaf.

Two other mystical tales give a name to that “beyond the mountain of Qaf and it is this name itself that marks the transformation from cosmic mountain to psychocosmic mountain, that is, the transition of the physical cosmos to what constitutes the first level of the spiritual universe. In the tale entitled “The Rustling of Gabriel’s Wings,” the figure again appears who, in the works of Avicenna, is named Hayy ibn Yaqzan (“the Living, son of the Watchman”) and who, just now, was designated as the Crimson Archangel. The question that must be asked is asked, and the reply is this: “I come from Na-koja-Abad.”2 Finally, in the tale entitled “Vade Mecum of the Faithful in Love” (Mu’nis al-‘oshshaq) which places on stage a cosmogonic triad whose dramatis personae are, respectively, Beauty, Love, and Sadness, Sadness appears to Ya’qab weeping for Joseph in the land of Canaan. To the question, “What horizon did you penetrate to come here?,” the same reply is given: “I come from Na-koja-Abad

Na-koja-Abad is a strange term. It does not occur in any Persian dictionary, and it was coined, as far as I know, by Sohravardi himself, from the resources of the purest Persian language. Literally, as I mentioned a moment ago, it signifies the city, the country or land (abad) of No-where (Na-koja) That is why we are here in the presence of a term that, at first sight, may appear to us as the exact equivalent of the term ou-topia, which, for its part, does not occur in the classical Greek dictionaries, and was coined by Thomas More as an abstract noun to designate the absence of any localization, of any given situs in a space that is discoverable and verifiable by the experience of our senses. Etymologically and literally, it would perhaps be exact to translate Na-koja-Abad by outopia, utopia, and yet with regard to the concept, the intention, and the true meaning, I believe that we would be guilty of mistranslation. It seems to me, therefore, that it is of fundamental importance to try, at least, to determine why this would be a mistranslation.

It is even a matter of indispensable precision, if we want to understand the meaning and the real implication of manifold information concerning the topographies explored in the visionary state, the state intermediate between waking and sleep-information that, for example, among the spiritual individuals of Shi’ite Islam, concerns the “land of the hidden Imam” A matter of precision that, in making us attentive to a differential affecting an entire region of the soul, and thus an entire spiritual culture, would lead us to ask: what conditions make possible that which we ordinarily call a utopia, and consequently the type of utopian man? How and why does it make its appearance? I wonder, in fact, whether the equivalent would be found anywhere in Islamic thought in its traditional form. I do not believe, for example, that when Farabi, in the tenth century, describes the “Perfect City,” or when the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bajja (Avempace), in the twelfth century, takes up the same theme in his “Regime of the Solitary”3 -I do not believe that either one of them contemplated what we call today a social or political utopia. To understand them in this way would be, I am afraid, to withdraw them from their own presuppositions and perspectives, in order to impose our own, our own dimensions; above all, I am afraid that it would be certain to entail resigning ourselves to confusing the Spiritual City with an imaginary City.

The word Na-koja-Abad does not designate something like unextended being, in the dimensionless state. The Persian word abad certainly signifies a city, a cultivated and peopled land, thus something extended. What Sohravardi means by being “beyond the mountain of Qaf is that he himself, and with him the entire theosophical tradition of Iran, represents the composite of the mystical cities of Jabalqa, Jabarsa, and Hurqalya. Topographically, he states precisely that this region begins “on the convex surface” of the Ninth Sphere, the Sphere of Spheres, or the Sphere that includes the whole of the cosmos. This means that it begins at the exact moment when one leaves the supreme Sphere, which defines all possible orientation in our world (or on this side of the world), the “Sphere” to which the celestial cardinal points refer. It is evident that once this boundary is crossed, the question “where?” (ubi, koja) loses its meaning, at least the meaning in which it is asked in the space of our sensory experience. Thus the name Na-koja-Abad: a place outside of place, a “place” that is not contained in a place, in a topos, that permits a response, with a gesture of the hand, to the question “where?” But when we say, “To depart from the where,” what does this mean?

It surely cannot relate to a change of local position,4 a physical transfer from one place to another place, as though it involved places contained in a single homogeneous space. As is suggested, at the end of Sohravardi’s tale, by the symbol of the drop of balm exposed in the hollow of the hand to the sun, it is a matter of entering, passing into the interior and, in passing into the interior, of finding oneself, paradoxically, outside, or, in the language of our authors, “on the convex surface” of the Ninth Sphere–in other words, “beyond the mountain of Qaf The relationship involved is essentially that of the external, the visible, the exoteric ( Arabic, zahir), and the internal, the invisible, the esoteric (Arabic, batin), or the natural world and the spiritual world. To depart from the where, the category of ubi, is to leave the external or natural appearances that enclose the hidden internal realities, as the almond is hidden beneath the shell. This step is made in order for the Stranger, the gnostic, to return home-or at least to lead to that return.

But an odd thing happens: once this transition is accomplished, it turns out that henceforth this reality, previously internal and hidden, is revealed to be enveloping, surrounding, containing what was first of all external and visible, since by means of interiorization, one has departed from that external reality. Henceforth, it is spiritual reality that envelops, surrounds, contains the reality called material. That is why spiritual reality is not “in the where.” It is the “where” that is in it. Or, rather, it is itself the “where” of all things; it is, therefore, not itself in a place, it does not fall under the question “where?“-the category ubi referring to a place in sensory space. Its place (its abad) in relation to this is Na-koja (No-where), because its ubi in relation to what is in sensory space is an ubique (everywhere). When we have understood this, we have perhaps understood what is essential to follow the topography of visionary experiences, to distinguish their meaning (that is, the signification and the direction simultaneously) and also to distinguish something fundamental, namely, what differentiates the visionary perceptions of our spiritual individuals (Sohravardi and many others) with regard to everything that our modern vocabulary subsumes under the pejorative sense of creations, imaginings, even utopian madness.

But what we must begin to destroy, to the extent that we are able to do so, even at the cost of a struggle resumed every day, is what may be called the “agnostic reflex” in Western man, because he has consented to the divorce between thought and being. How many recent theories tacitly originate in this reflex, thanks to which we hope to escape the other reality before which certain experiences and certain evidence place us-and to escape it, in the case where we secretly submit to its attraction, by giving it all sorts of ingenious explanations, except one: the one that would permit it truly to mean for us, by its existence, what it is! For it to mean that to us, we must, at all events, have available a cosmology of such a kind that the most astounding information of modern science regarding the physical universe remains inferior to it. For, insofar as it is a matter of that sort of information, we remain bound to what is “on this side of the mountain of Qaf What distinguishes the traditional cosmology of the theosophers in Islam, for example, is that its structurewhere the worlds and interworlds “beyond the mountain of Qaf that is, beyond the physical universes, are arranged in levels intelligible only for an existence in which the act of being is in accordance with its presence in those worlds, for reciprocally, it is in accordance with this act of being that these worlds are present to it.5 What dimension, then, must this act of being have in order to be, or to become in the course of its future rebirths, the place of those worlds that are outside the place of our natural space? And, first of all, what are those worlds?

I can only refer here to a few texts. A larger number will be found translated and grouped in the book that I have entitled Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth.6 In his “Book of Conversations,” Sohravardi writes: “When you learn in the treatises of the ancient Sages that there exists a world provided with dimensions and extension, other than the pleroma of Intelligences [that is, a world below that of the pure archangelic Intelligences], and other than the world governed by the Souls of the Spheres [that is, a world which, while having dimension and extension, is other than the world of sensory phenomena, and superior to it, including the sidereal universe, the planets and the “fixed stars”], a world where there are cities whose number it is impossible to count, cities among which our Prophet himself named Jabalqa and Jabarsa, do not hasten to call it a lie, for pilgrims of the spirit may contemplate that world, and they find there everything that is the object of their desire.”7

These few lines refer us to a schema on which all of our mystical theosophers agree, a schema that articulates three universes or, rather, three categories of universe. There is our physical sensory world, which includes both our earthly world (governed by human souls) and the sidereal universe (governed by the Souls of the Spheres); this is the sensory world, the world of phenomena (molk). There is the suprasensory world of the Soul or Angel-Souls, the Malakut, in which there are the mystical cities that we have just named, and which begins “on the convex surface of the Ninth Sphere.” There is the universe of pure archangelic Intelligences. To these three universes correspond three organs of knowledge: the senses, the imagination, and the intellect, a triad to which corresponds the triad of anthropology: body, soul, spirit-a triad that regulates the triple growth of man, extending from this world to the resurrections in the other worlds.

We observe immediately that we are no longer reduced to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology limited to the empirical world and the world of abstract understanding. Between the two is placed an intermediate world, which our authors designate as ‘alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition. This faculty is the imaginative power, the one we must avoid confusing with the imagination that modern man identifies with “fantasy” and that, according to him, produces only the “imaginary.” Here we are, then, simultaneously at the heart of our research and of our problem of terminology.

What is that intermediate universe? It is the one we mentioned a little while ago as being called the “eighth climate.”8 For all of our thinkers, in fact, the world of extension perceptible to the senses includes the seven climates of their traditional geography. But there is still another climate, represented by that world which, however, possesses extension and dimensions, forms and colors, without their being perceptible to the senses, as they are when they are properties of physical bodies. No, these dimensions, shapes, and colors are the proper object of imaginative perception or the “psycho- spiritual senses”; and that world, fully objective and real, where everything existing in the sensory world has its analogue, but not perceptible by the senses, is the world that is designated as the eighth climate. The term is sufficiently eloquent by itself, since it signifies a climate outside of climates, a place outside of place, outside of where (Na-koja-Abad!).

The technical term that designates it in Arabic, ‘alam a mithal, can perhaps also be translated by mundus archetypus, ambiguity is avoided. For it is the same word that serves in Arabic to designate the Platonic Ideas (interpreted by Sohravardi terms of Zoroastrian angelology). However, when the term refers to Platonic Ideas, it is almost always accompanied by this precise qualification: mothol (plural of mithal) aflatuniya nuraniya, the “Platonic archetypes of light.” When the term refers to the world of the eighth climate, it designates technically, on one hand, the Archetype-Images of individual and singular things; in this case, it relates to the eastern region of the eighth climate, the city of Jabalqa, where these images subsist preexistent to and ordered before the sensory world. But on the other hand, the term also relates to the western region, the city of Jabarsa, as being the world or interworld in which are found the Spirits after their presence in the natural terrestrial world and as a world in which subsist the forms of all works accomplished, the forms of our thoughts and our desires, of our presentiments and our behavior.9 It is this composition that constitutes ‘alam al-mithal, the mundus imaginalis.

Technically, again, our thinkers designate it as the world of “Images in suspense” (mothol mo’allaqa). Sohravardi! and his school mean by this a mode of being proper to the realities of that intermediate world, which we designate as Imaginalia.10 The precise nature of this ontological status results from vision any spiritual experiences, on which Sohravardi asks that we rely fully, exactly as we rely in astronomy on the observations of Hipparchus or Ptolemy. It should be acknowledged that forms and shapes in the mundus imaginalis do not subsist in the same manner as empirical realities in the physical world; otherwise anyone could perceive them. It should also be noted that the) cannot subsist in the pure intelligible world, since they have extension and dimension, an “immaterial” materiality, certainly, in relation to that of the sensory world, but, in fact, their own “corporeality” and spatiality (one might think here of the expression used by Henry More, a Cambridge Platonist, spissitudo spiritualis, an expression that has its exact equivalent in the work of Sadra Shirazi, a Persian Platonist). For the same reason, that they could have only our thought as a substratum would be excluded, as it would, at the same time, that they might be unreal, nothing; otherwise, we could not discern them, classify them into hierarchies, or make judgments about them. The existence of this intermediate world, mundus imaginalis, thus appears metaphysically necessary; the cognitive function of the Imagination is ordered to it; it is a world whose ontological level is above the world of the senses and below the pure intelligible world; it is more immaterial than the former and less immaterial than the latter.11 There has always been something of major importance in this for all our mystical theosophers. Upon it depends, for them, both the validity of visionary accounts that perceive and relate “events in Heaven” and the validity of dreams, symbolic rituals, the reality of places formed by intense meditation, the reality of inspired imaginative visions, cosmogonies and theogonies, and thus, in the first place, the truth of the spiritual sense perceived in the imaginative data of prophetic revelations.12

In short, that world is the world of “subtle bodies,” the idea of which proves indispensable if one wishes to describe a link between the pure spirit and the material body. It is this which relates to the designation of their mode of being as “in suspense,” that is, a mode of being such that the Image or Form, since it is itself its own “matter,” is independent of any substratum in which it would be immanent in the manner of an accident.13 This means that it would not subsist as the color black, for example, subsists by means of the black object in which it is immanent, The comparison to which our authors regularly have recourse is the mode of appearance and subsistence of Images “in suspense” in a mirror. The material substance of the mirror, metal or mineral, is not the substance of the image, a substance whose image would be an accident. It is simply the “place of its appearance.” This led to a general theory of epiphanic places and forms (mazhar, plural mazahir) so characteristic of Sohravardi’s Eastern Theosophy.

The active Imagination is the preeminent mirror, the epiphanic place of the Images of the archetypal world; that is why the theory of the mundus imaginalis is bound up with a theory of imaginative knowledge and imaginative function–a function truly central and mediatory, because of the median and mediatory position of the mundus imaginalis. It is a function that permits all the universes to symbolize with one another (or exist in symbolic relationship with one another) and that leads us to represent to ourselves, experimentally, that the same substantial realities assume forms corresponding respectively to each universe (for example, Jabalqa and Jabarsa correspond in the subtle world to the Elements of the physical world, while Hurqalya corresponds there to the Sky). It is the cognitive function of the Imagination that permits the establishment of a rigorous analogical knowledge, escaping the dilemma of current rationalism, which leaves only a choice between the two terms of banal dualism: either “matter” or “spirit,” a dilemma that the “socialization” of consciousness resolves by substituting a choice that is no less fatal: either “history” or “myth.”

This is the sort of dilemma that has never defeated those familiar with the “eighth climate,” the realm of “subtle bodies,” of “spiritual bodies,” threshold of the Malakut or world of the Soul. We understand that when they say that the world of Hurqalya begins “on the convex surface of the supreme Sphere,” they wish to signify symbolically that this world is at the boundary where there is an inversion of the relation of interiority expressed by the preposition in or within, “in the interior of.” Spiritual bodies or spiritual entities are no longer in a world, not even in their world, in the way that a material body is in its place, or is contained in another body. It is their world that is in them. That is why the Theology attributed to Aristotle, the Arabic version of the last three Enneads of Plotinus, which Avicenna annotated and which all of our thinkers read and meditated upon, explains that each spiritual entity is “in the totality of the sphere of its Heaven”; each subsists, certainly, independently of the other, but all are simultaneous and each is within every other one. It would be completely false to picture that other world as an undifferentiated, informal heaven. There is multiplicity, of course, but the relations of spiritual space differ from the relations of space understood under the starry Heaven, as much as the fact of being in a body differs from the fact of being “in the totality of its Heaven.” That is why it can be said that “behind this world there is a Sky, an Earth, an ocean, animals, plants, and celestial men; but every being there is celestial; the spiritual entities there correspond to the human beings there, but no earthly thing is there.”

The most exact formulation of all this, in the theosophical tradition of the West, is found perhaps in Swedenborg. One cannot but be struck by the concordance or convergence of the statements by the great Swedish visionary with those of Sohravardi, Ibn ‘Arabi, or Sadra Shirazi. Swedenborg explains that “all things in heaven appear, just as in the world, to be in place and in space, and yet the angels have no notion or idea of place or space.” This is because “all changes of place in the spiritual world are effected by changes of state in the interiors, which means that change of place is nothing else than change of state…. Those are near each other who are in like states, and those are at a distance who are in unlike states; and spaces in heaven are simply the external conditions corresponding to the internal states. For the same reason the heavens are distinct from each other. . . . When anyone goes from one place to another . . . he arrives more quickly when he eagerly desires it, and less quickly when he does not, the way itself being lengthened and shortened in accordance with the desire…. This I have often seen to my surprise. All this again makes clear how distances, and consequently spaces, are wholly in accord with states of the interiors of angels; and this being so, no notion or idea of space can enter their thought, although there are spaces with them equally as in the world.”14

Such a description is eminently appropriate to Na-koja-Abad and its mysterious Cities. In short, it follows that there is a spiritual place and a corporeal place. The transfer of one to the other is absolutely not effected according to the laws of our homogeneous physical space. In relation to the corporeal place, the spiritual place is a No-where, and for the one who reaches Na-koja-Abad everything occurs inversely to the evident facts of ordinary consciousness, which remains orientated to the interior of our space. For henceforth it is the where, the place, that resides in the soul; it is the corporeal substance that resides in the spiritual substance; it is the soul that encloses and bears the body. This is why it is not possible to say where the spiritual place is situated; it is not situated, it is, rather, that which situates, it is situative. Its ubi is an ubique. Certainly, there may be topographical correspondences between the sensory world and the mundus imaginalis, one symbolizing with the other. However, there is no passage from one to the other without a breach. Many accounts show us this. One sets out; at a given moment, there is a break with the geographical coordinates that can be located on our maps. But the “traveler” is not conscious of the precise moment; he does not realize it, with disquiet or wonder, until later. If he were aware of it, he could change his path at will, or he could indicate it to others. But he can only describe where he was; he cannot show the way to anyone.

II. THE SPIRITUAL IMAGINATION

We will touch here on the decisive point for which all that precedes has prepared us, namely, the organ that permits penetration into the mundus imaginalis, the migration to the “eighth climate.” What is the organ by means of which that migration occurs-the migration that is the return ab extra ad intra (from the exterior to the interior), the topographical inversion (the intussusception)? It is neither the senses nor the faculties of the physical organism, nor is it the pure intellect, but it is that intermediate power whose function appears as the preeminent mediator: the active Imagination. Let us be very clear when we speak of this. It is the organ that permits the transmutation of internal spiritual states into external states, into vision-events symbolizing with those internal states. It is by means of this transmutation that all progression in spiritual space is accomplished, or, rather, this transmutation is itself what spatializes that space, what causes space, proximity, distance, and remoteness to be there.

A first postulate is that this Imagination is a pure spiritual faculty, independent of the physical organism, and consequently is able to subsist after the disappearance of the latter. Sadra Shirazi, among others, has expressed himself repeatedly on this point with particular forcefulness.15 He says that just as the soul is independent of the physical material body in receiving intelligible things in act, according to its intellective power, the soul is equally independent with regard to its imaginative power and its imaginative operations. In addition, when it is separated from this world, since it continues to have its active Imagination at its service, it can perceive by itself, by its own essence and by that faculty, concrete things whose existence, as it is actualized in its knowledge and in its imagination, constitutes eo ipso the very form of concrete existence of those things (in other words: consciousness and its object are here ontologically inseparable). All these powers are gathered and concentrated in a single faculty, which is the active Imagination. Because it has stopped dispersing itself at the various thresholds that are the five senses of the physical body, and has stopped being solicited by the concerns of the physical body, which is prey to the vicissitudes of the external world, the imaginative perception can finally show its essential superiority over sensory perception.

“All the faculties of the soul,” writes Sadra Shirazi, “have become as though a single faculty, which is the power to configure and typify (taswir and tamthil); its imagination has itself become like a sensory perception of the suprasensory: its imaginative sight is itself like its sensory sight. Similarly, its senses of hearing, smell, taste, and touch-all these imaginative senses-are themselves like sensory faculties, but regulated to the suprasensory. For although externally the sensory faculties are five in number, each having its organ localized in the body, internally, in fact, all of them constitute a single synaisthesis (hiss moshtarik).” The Imagination being therefore like the currus subtilis (in Greek okhema, vehicle, or [in Proclus, Iamblichus, etc.] spiritual body) of the soul, there is an entire physiology of the “subtle body” and thus of the “resurrection body,” which Sadra Shirazi discusses in these contexts. That is why he reproaches even Avicenna for having identified these acts of posthumous imaginative perception with what happens in this life during sleep, for here, and during sleep, the imaginative power is disturbed by the organic operations that occur in the physical body. Much is required for it to enjoy its maximum of perfection and activity, freedom and purity. Otherwise, sleep would be simply an awakening in the other world. This is not the case, as is alluded to in this remark attributed sometimes to the Prophet and sometimes to the First Imam of the Shi’ites: “Humans sleep. It is when they die that they awake.”

A second postulate, evidence for which compels recognition, is that the spiritual Imagination is a cognitive power, an organ of true knowledge. Imaginative perception and imaginative consciousness have their own noetic (cognitive) function and value, in relation to the world that is theirs-the world, we have said, which is the ‘alam al-mithal, mundus imaginalis, the world of the mystical cities such as Hurqalya, where time becomes reversible and where space is a function of desire, because it is only the external aspect of an internal state.

The Imagination is thus firmly balanced between two other cognitive functions: its own world symbolizes with the world to which the two other functions (sensory knowledge and intellective knowledge) respectively correspond. There is accordingly something like a control that keeps the Imagination from wanderings and profligacy, and that permits it to assume its full function: to cause the occurrence, for example, of the events that are related by the visionary tales of Sohravardi and all those of the same kind, because every approach to the eighth climate is made by the imaginative path. It may be said that this is the reason for the extraordinary gravity of mystical epic poems written in Persian (from ‘Attar to jami and to Nur ‘Ali1-Shah), which constantly amplify the same archetypes in new symbols. In order for the Imagination to wander and become profligate, for it to cease fulfilling its function, which is to perceive or generate symbols leading to the internal sense, it is necessary for the mundus imaginalis–the proper domain of the Malakut, the world of the Soul-to disappear. Perhaps it is necessary, in the West, to date the beginning of this decadence at the time when Averroism rejected Avicennian cosmology, with its intermediate angelic hierarchy of the Animae or Angeli caelestes. These Angeli caelestes (a hierarchy below that of the Angeli intellectuales) had the privilege of imaginative power in its pure state. Once the universe of these Souls disappeared, it was the imaginative function as such that was unbalanced and devalued. It is easy to understand, then, the advice given later by Paracelsus, warning against any confusion of the Imaginatio vera, as the alchemists said, with fantasy, “that cornerstone of the mad.”16

This is the reason that we can no longer avoid the problem of terminology. How is it that we do not have in French [or in English] a common and perfectly satisfying term to express the idea of the ‘alam al-mithal? I have proposed the Latin mundus imaginalis for it, because we are obliged to avoid any confusion between what is here the object of imaginative or imaginant perception and what we ordinarily call the imaginary. This is so, because the current attitude is to oppose the real to the imaginary as though to the unreal, the utopian, as it is to confuse symbol with allegory, to confuse the exegesis of the spiritual sense with an allegorical interpretation. Now, every allegorical interpretation is harmless; the allegory is a sheathing, or, rather, a disguising, of something that is already known or knowable otherwise, while the appearance of an Image having the quality of a symbol is a primary phenomenon (Urphanomen), unconditional and irreducible, the appearance of something that cannot manifest itself otherwise to the world where we are.

Neither the tales of Sohravardi, nor the tales which in the Shi’ite tradition tell us of reaching the “land of the Hidden Imam,” are imaginary, unreal, or allegorical, precisely because the eighth climate or the “land of No-where” is not what we commonly call a utopia. It is certainly a world that remains beyond the empirical verification of our sciences. Otherwise, anyone could find access to it and evidence for it. It is a suprasensory world, insofar as it is not perceptible except by the imaginative perception, and insofar as the events that occur in it cannot be experienced except by the imaginative or imaginant consciousness. Let us be certain that we understand, here again, that this is not a matter simply of what the language of our time calls an imagination, but of a vision that is Imaginatio vera. And it is to this Imaginatio vera that we must attribute a noetic or plenary cognitive value. If we are no longer capable of speaking about the imagination except as “fantasy,” if we cannot utilize it or tolerate it except as such, it is perhaps because we have forgotten the norms and the rules and the “axial ordination” that are responsible for the cognitive function of the imaginative power (the function that I have sometimes designated as imaginatory).

For the world into which our witnesses have penetrated-we will meet two or three of those witnesses in the final section of this study-is a perfectly real world, more evident even and more coherent, in its own reality, than the real empirical world perceived by the senses. Its witnesses were afterward perfectly conscious that they had been “elsewhere”; they are not schizorphrenics. It is a matter of a world that is hidden in the act itself of sensory perception, and one that we must find under the apparent objective certainty of that kind of perception. That is why we positively cannot qualify it as imaginary, in the current sense in which the word is taken to mean unreal, nonexistent. Just as the Latin word origo has given us the derivative “original,” I believe that the word imago can give us, along with imaginary, and by regular derivation, the term imaginal. We will thus have the imaginal world be intermediate between the sensory world and the intelligible world. When we encounter the Arabic term jism mithali to designate the “subtle body” that penetrates into the “eighth climate,” or the “resurrection body,” we will be able to translate it literally as imaginal body, but certainly not as imaginary body. Perhaps, then, we will have less difficulty in placing the figures who belong neither to “myth” nor to “history,” and perhaps we will have a sort of password to the path to the “lost continent.”

In order to embolden us on this path, we have to ask ourselves what constitutes our real, the real for us, so that if we leave it, would we have more than the imaginary, utopia? And what is the real for our traditional Eastern thinkers, so that they may have access to the “eighth climate,” to Na-koja-Abad, by leaving the sensory place without leaving the real, or, rather, by having access precisely to the real? This presupposes a scale of being with many more degrees than ours. For let us make no mistake. It is not enough to concede that our predecessors, in the West, had a conception of the Imagination that was too rationalistic and too intellectualized. If we do not have available a cosmology whose schema can include, as does the one that belongs to our traditional philosophers, the plurality of universes in ascensional order, our Imagination will remain unbalanced, its recurrent conjunctions with the will to power will be an endless source of horrors. We will be continually searching for a new discipline of the Imagination, and we will have great difficulty in finding it as long as we persist in seeing in it only a certain way of keeping our distance with regard to what we call the real, and in order to exert an influence on that real. Now, that real appears to us as arbitrarily limited, as soon as we compare it to the real that our traditional theosophers have glimpsed, and that limitation degrades the reality itself. In addition, it is always the word fantasy that appears as an excuse: literary fantasy, for example, or preferably, in the taste and style of the day, social fantasy.

But it is impossible to avoid wondering whether the mundus imaginalis, in the proper meaning of the term, would of necessity be lost and leave room only for the imaginary if something like a secularization of the imaginal into the imaginary were not required for the fantastic, the horrible, the monstrous, the macabre, the miserable, and the absurd to triumph. On the other hand, the art and imagination of Islamic culture in its traditional form are characterized by the hieratic and the serious, by gravity, stylization, and meaning. Neither our utopias, nor our science fiction, nor the sinister “omega point”-nothing of that kind succeeds in leaving this world or attaining Na-koja-Abad. Those who have known the “eighth climate” have not invented utopias, nor is the ultimate thought of Shi’ism a social or political fantasy, but it is an eschatology, because it is an expectation which is, as such, a real Presence here and now in another world, and a testimony to that other world.

111. TOPOGRAPHIES OF THE “EIGHTH CLIMATE”

We ought here to examine the extensive theory of the witnesses to that other world. We ought to question all those mystics who, in Islam, repeated the visionary experience of the heavenly assumption of the Prophet Muhammad (the mi’raj), which offers more than one feature in common with the account, preserved in an old gnostic book, of the celestial visions of the prophet Isaiah. There, the activity of imaginative perception truly assumes the aspect of a hierognosis, a higher sacral knowledge. But in order to complete our discussion, I will limit myself to describing several features typical of accounts taken from Shi’ite literature, because the world into which it will allow us to penetrate seems, at first sight, still to be our world, while in fact the events take place in the eighth climate-not in the imaginary, but in the imaginal world, that is, the world whose coordinates cannot be plotted on our maps, and where the Twelfth Imam, the “Hidden Imam,” lives a mysterious life surrounded by his companions, who are veiled under the same incognito as the Imam. One of the most typical of these accounts is the tale of a voyage to “the Green Island situated in the White Sea.”

It is impossible to describe here, even in broad terms, what constitutes the essence of Shi’ite Islam in relation to what is appropriately called Sunni orthodoxy. It is necessary, however, that we should have, at least allusively present in mind, the theme that dominates the horizon of the mystical theosophy of Shi’ism, namely, the “eternal prophetic Reality” (Haqiqat mohammadiya) that is designated as “Muhammadan Logos” or “Muhammadan Light” and is composed of fourteen entities of light: the Prophet, his daughter Fatima, and the twelve Imams. This is the pleroma of the “Fourteen Pure Ones,” by means of whose countenance the mystery of an eternal theophany is accomplished from world to world. Shi’ism has thus given Islamic prophetology its metaphysical foundation at the same time that it has given it lmamology as the absolutely necessary complement. This means that the sense of the Divine Revelations is not limited to the letter, to the exoteric that is the cortex and containant, and that was enunciated by the Prophet; the true sense is the hidden internal, the esoteric, what is symbolized by the cortex, and which it is incumbent upon the Imams to reveal to their followers. That is why Shi’ite theosophy eminently possesses the sense of symbols.

Moreover, the closed group or dynasty of the twelve Imams is not a political dynasty in earthly competition with other political dynasties; it projects over them, in a way, as the dynasty of the guardians of the Grail, in our Western traditions, projects over the official hierarchy of the Church. The ephemeral earthly appearance of the twelve Imams concluded with the twelfth, who, as a young child (in A.H. 260/A.D. 873) went into occultation from this world, but whose parousia the Prophet himself announced, the Manifestation at the end of our Aion, when he would reveal the hidden meaning of all Divine Revelations and fill the earth with justice and peace, as it will have been filled until then with violence and tyranny. Present simultaneously in the past and the future, the Twelfth Imam, the Hidden Imam, has been for ten centuries the history itself of Shi’ite consciousness, a history over which, of course, historical criticism loses its rights, for its events, although real, nevertheless do not have the reality of events in our climates, but they have the reality of those in the “eighth climate,” events of the soul which are visions. His occultation occurred at two different times: the minor occultation (260/873) and the major occultation (330/942).17 Since then, the Hidden Imam is in the position of those who were removed from the visible world without crossing the threshold of death: Enoch, Elijah, and Christ himself, according to the teaching of the Qur’an. He is the Imam “hidden from the senses, but present in the heart of his followers,” in the words of the consecrated formula, for he remains the mystical pole [qotb] of this world, the pole of poles, without whose existence the human world could not continue to exist. There is an entire Shi’ite literature about those to whom the Imam has manifested himself, or who have approached him but without seeing him, during the period of the Great Occultation.

Of course, an understanding of these accounts postulates certain premises that our preceding analyses permit us to accept. The first point is that the Imam lives in a mysterious place that is by no means among those that empirical geography can verify; it cannot be situated on our maps. This place “outside of place” nonetheless has its own topography. The second point is that life is not limited to the conditions of our visible material world with its biological laws that we know. There are events in the life of the Hidden Imam-even descriptions of his five sons, who are the governors of mysterious cities. The third point is that in his last letter to his last visible representative, the Imam warned against the imposture of people who would pretend to quote him, to have seen him, in order to lay claim to a public or political role in his name. But the Imam never excluded the fact that he would manifest himself to aid someone in material or moral distress-a lost traveler, for example, or a believer who is in despair.

These manifestations, however, never occur except at the initiative of the Imam; and if he appears most often in the guise of a young man of supernatural beauty, almost always, subject to exception, the person granted the privilege of this vision is only conscious afterward, later, of whom he has seen. A strict incognito covers these manifestations; that is why the religious event here can never be socialized. The same incognito covers the Imam’s companions, that elite of elites composed of young people in his service. They form an esoteric hierarchy of a strictly limited number, which remains permanent by means of substitution from generation to generation. This mystical order of knights, which surrounds the Hidden Imam, is subject to an incognito as strict as that of the knights of the Grail, inasmuch as they do not lead anyone to themselves. But someone who has been led there will have penetrated for a moment into the eighth climate; for a moment he will have been “in the totality of the Heaven of his soul.”

That was indeed the experience of a young Iranian shaykh, ‘Ali ibn Fazel Mazandarani, toward the end of our thirteenth century, an experience recorded in the Account of strange and marvelous things that he contemplated and saw with his own eyes on the Green Island situated in the White Sea. I can only give a broad outline of this account here, without going into the details that guarantee the means and authenticity of its transmission.18 The narrator himself gives a long recital of the years and circumstances of his life preceding the event; we are dealing with a scholarly and spiritual personality who has both feet on the ground. He tells us how he emigrated, how in Damascus he followed the teaching of an Andalusian shaykh, and how he became attached to this shaykh; and when the latter left for Egypt, he together with a few other disciples accompanied him. From Cairo he followed him to Andalusia, where the shaykh had suddenly been called by a letter from his dying father. Our narrator had scarcely arrived in Andalusia when he contracted a fever that lasted for three days. Once recovered, he went into the village and saw a strange group of men who had come from a region near the land of the Berbers, not far from the “peninsula of the Shi’ites.” He is told that the journey takes twenty-five days, with a large desert to cross. He decides to join the group. Up to this point, we are still more or less on the geographical map.

But it is no longer at all certain that we are still on it when our traveler reaches the peninsula of the Shi’ites, a peninsula surrounded by four walls with high massive towers; the outside wall borders the coast of the sea. He asks to be taken to the principal mosque. There, for the first time, he hears, during the muezzin’s call to prayer, resounding from the minaret of the mosque, the Shl’ite invocation asking that “Joy should hasten,” that is, the joy of the future Appearance of the Imam, who is now hidden. In order to understand his emotion and his tears, it is necessary to think of the heinous persecutions, over the course of many centuries and over vast portions of the territory of Islam, that reduced the Shi’ites, the followers of the holy Imams, to a state of secrecy. Recognition among Shi’ites is effected here again in the observation, in a typical manner, of the customs of the “discipline of the arcanum.”

Our pilgrim takes up residence among his own, but he notices in the course of his walks that there is no sown field in the area. Where do the inhabitants obtain their food? He learns that food comes to them from “the Green Island situated in the White Sea,” which is one of the islands belonging to the sons of the Hidden Imam. Twice a year, a flotilla of seven ships brings it to them. That year the first voyage had already taken place; it would be necessary to wait four months until the next voyage.The account describes the pilgrim passing his days, overwhelmed by the kindness of the inhabitants, but in an anguish of expectation, walking tirelessly along the beach, always watching the high sea, toward the west, for the arrival of the ships. We might be tempted to believe that we are on the African coast of the Atlantic and that the Green Island belongs, perhaps, to the Canaries or the “Fortunate Isles.” The details that follow will suffice to undeceive us. Other traditions place the Green Island elsewhere-in the Caspian Sea, for example-as though to indi- cate to us that it has no coordinates in the geography of this world.

Finally, as if according to the law of the “eighth climate” ar- dent desire has shortened space, the seven ships arrive somewhat in advance and make their entry into the port. From the largest of the ships descends a shaykh of noble and commanding appearance,with a handsome face and magnificent clothes. A conversation begins,and our pilgrim realizes with astonishment that the shaykh already knows everything about him, his name and his origin. The shaykh is his Companion, and he tells him that he has come to find him: together they will leave for the Green Island. This episode bears a characteristic feature of the gnostic’sfeeling everywhere and always: he is an exile, separated from his own people, whom he barely remembers, and he has still less an idea of the way that will take him back to them. One day, though, a message arrives from them, as in the “Song of the Pearl” in the Acts of Thomas, as in the “Tale of Western Exile” by Sohravardi. Here, there is something better than a message: it is one of the companions of the Imam in person. Our narrator exclaims movingly: “Upon hearing these words, I was overwhelmed with happiness. Someone remembered me, my name was known to them!” Was his exile at an end? From now on, he is entirely certain that the itinerary cannot be transferred onto our maps.

The crossing lasts sixteen days, after which the ship enters an area where the waters of the sea are completely white; the Green Island is outlined on the horizon. Our pilgrim learns from his Companion that the White Sea forms an uncrossable zone of protection around the island; no ship manned by the enemies of the Imam and his people can venture there without the waves engulfing it. Our travelers land on the Green Island. There is a city at the edge of the sea; seven walls with high towers protect the precincts (this is the preeminent symbolic plan). There are luxuriant vegetation and abundant streams. The buildings are constructed from diaphanous marble. All the inhabitants have beautiful and young faces, and they wear magnificent clothes. Our Iranian shaykh feels his heart fill with joy, and from this point on, throughout the entire second part, his account will take on the rhythm and the meaning of an initiation account, in which we can distinguish three phases. There is an initial series of conversations with a noble personage who is none other than a grandson of the Twelfth Imam (the son of one of his five sons), and who governs the Green Island: Sayyed Shamsoddin These conversations compose a first initiation into the secret of the Hidden Imam; they take place sometimes in the shadow of: mosque and sometimes in the serenity of gardens filled with per fumed trees of all kinds. There follows a visit to a mysterious sanctuary in the heart of the mountain that is the highest pea on the island. Finally, there is a concluding series of conversations of decisive importance with regard to the possibility or in possibility of having a vision of the Imam.

I am giving the briefest possible summary here, and I must pass over in silence the details of scenery depiction and of an intensely animated dramaturgy, in order to note only the central episode. At the summit or at the heart of the mountain, which is in the center of the Green Island, there is a small temple, with a cupola, where one can communicate with the Imam, because it happens that he leaves a personal message there, but no one is permitted to ascend to this temple except Sayyed Shamsoddin and those who are like him. This small temple stands in the shadow of the Tuba tree; now, we know that this is the name of the tree that shades Paradise; it is the Tree of Being. The temple is at the edge of a spring, which, since it gushes at the base of the Tree of Paradise, can only be the Spring of Life. In order to confirm this for us, our pilgrim meets there the incumbent of this temple, in whom we recognize the mysterious prophet Khezr (Khadir). It is there, at the heart of being, in the shade of the Tree and at the edge of the Spring, that the sanctuary is found where the Hidden Imam may be most closely approached. Here we have an entire constellation of easily recognizable archetypal symbols.

We have learned, among other things, that access to the little mystical temple was only permitted to a’ person who, by attainMg the spiritual degree at which the Imam has become his personal internal Guide, has attained a state “similar” to that of the actual descendant of the Imam. This is why the idea of internal conformation is truly at the center of the initiation account, and it is this that permits the pilgrim to learn other secrets of the Green Island: for example, the symbolism of a particularly eloquent ritual.19 In the Shi’ite liturgical calendar, Friday is the weekday especially dedicated to the Twelfth Imam. Moreover, in the lunar calendar, the middle of the month marks the midpoint of the lunar cycle, and the middle of the month of Sha’ban is the anniversary date of the birth of the Twelfth Imam into this world. On a Friday, then, while our Iranian pilgrim is praying in the mosque, he hears a great commotion outside. His initiator, Sayyed, informs him that each time the day of the middle of the month falls on a Friday, the chiefs of the mysterious militia thatsurrounds the Imam assemble in “expectation of joy,” a consecrated term, as we know, which means: in the expectation of the Manifestation of the Imam in this world. Leaving the mosque, he sees a gathering of horsemen from whom a triumphal clamor rises. These are the 313 chiefs of the supernatural order of knights always present incognito in this world, in the service of the Imam. This episode leads us gradually to the final scenes that precede the farewell. Like a leitmotiv, the expression of the desire to see the Imam returns ceaselessly. Our pilgrim will learn that twice in his life he was in the Imams presence: he was lost in the desert and the Imam came to his aid. But as is an almost constant rule, he knew nothing of it then; he learns of it now that he has come to the Green Island. Alas, he must leave this island; the order cannot be rescinded; the ships are waiting, the same one on which he arrived. But even more than for the voyage outward, it is impossible for us to mark out the itinerary that leads from the “eighth climate” to this world. Our traveler obliterates his tracks, but he will keep some material evidence of his sojourn: the pages of notes taken in the course of his conversations with the Imam’s grandson, and the parting gift from the latter at the moment of farewell.

The account of the Green Island allows us an abundant harvest of symbols: (1) It is one of the islands belonging to the son of the Twelfth Imam. (2) It is that island, where the Spring of Life gushes, in the shade of the Tree of Paradise, that ensure the sustenance of the Imams followers who live far away, an that sustenance can only be a “suprasubstantial” food. (3) It situated in the west, as the city of Jabarsa is situated in the we of the mundus imaginalis, and thus it offers a strange analogy with the paradise of the East, the paradise of Amitabha in Pure Land Buddhism; similarly, the figure of the Twelfth Imam suggestive of comparison with Maitreya, the future Buddha; there is also an analogy with Tir-na’n-0g, one of the worlds the Afterlife among the Celts, the land of the West and the forever ever young. (4) Like the domain of the Grail, it is an interworld that is self-sufficient. (5) It is protected against and immune to any attempt from outside. (6) only one who is summoned there can find the way. (7) A mountain rises in the center; we have noted the symbols that it conceals. (8) Like Mont-Salvat, the inviolable Green Island is the place where his followers approach the mystical pole of the world, the Hidden Imam, reigning invisibly over this age- the jewel of the Shi’ite faith.

This tale is completed by others, for, as we have mentioned, nothing has been said until now about the islands under the reign of the truly extraordinary figures who are the five sons of the Hidden Imam (homologues of those whom Shi’ism designates as the “Five Personages of the Mantle”20 and perhaps also of those whom Manichaeism designates as the “Five Sons of the Living Spirit”). An earlier tale21 (it is from the middle of the twelfth century and the narrator is a Christian) provides us with complementary topographical information. Here again it involves travelers who suddenly realize that their ship has entered a completely unknown area. They land at a first island, al Mobaraka, the Blessed City. Certain difficulties, brought about by the presence among them of Sunni Muslims, oblige them to travel farther. But their captain refuses; he is afraid of the unknown region. They have to hire a new crew. In succession, we learn the names of the five islands and the names of those who govern them: al-Zahera, the City Blooming with Flowers; al Ra’yeqa, the Limpid City; al-Safiya, the Serene City, etc. Whoever manages to gain admittance to them enters into joy forever. Five islands, five cities, five sons of the Imam, twelve months to travel through the islands (two months for each of the first four, four months for the fifth), all of these numbers having a symbolic significance. Here, too, the tale turns into an initiation account; all the travelers finally embrace the Shi’ite faith.

As there is no rule without an exception, I will conclude by citing in condensed form a tale illustrating a case of manifestation of the Imam in person.22 The tale is from the tenth century. An Iranian from Hamadan made the pilgrimage to Mecca. On the way back, a day’s journey from Mecca (more than two thousand kilometers from Hamadan), having imprudently gone astray during the night, he loses his companions. In the morning he is wandering alone in the desert and placing his trust in God, Suddenly, he sees a garden that neither he nor anyone else has ever heard of. He enters it. At the door of a pavilion, two young pages dressed in white await him and lead him to a young mar of supernatural beauty. To his fearful and awestruck astonishment, he learns that he is in the presence of the Twelfth Imam The latter speaks to him about his future Appearance and finally addressing him by name, asks him whether he wants to return to his home and family. Certainly, he wants to do so. The Imam signals to one of his pages, who gives the traveler a purse, take him by the hand, and guides him through the gardens. The, walk together until the traveler sees a group of houses, a mosque, and shade trees that seem familiar to him. Smiling, the page asks him: “Do you know this land?” “Near where I live in Hamadan” he replies, “there is a land called Asadabad, which exactly resembles this place.” The page says to him, “But you are in Asadabad. “Amazed, the traveler realizes that he is actually near his home. He turns around; the page is no longer then he is all alone, but he still has in his hand the viaticum that ha been given to him. Did we not say a little while ago that the where, the ubi of the “eighth climate” is an ubique?

I know how many commentaries can be applied to these tale depending upon whether we are metaphysicians, traditionalist or not, or whether we are psychologists. But by way of provisional conclusion, I prefer to limit myself to asking three small questions:

1. We are no longer participants in a traditional culture; we live in a scientific civilization that is extending its control, it said, even to images. It is commonplace today to speak of a “civilization of the image” (thinking of our magazines, cinema, and television). But one wonders whether, like all commonplace this does not conceal a radical misunderstanding, a complete error. For instead of the image being elevated to the level of a world that would be proper to it, instead of it appearing invested with a symbolic function, leading to an internal sense, there is above all a reduction of the image to the level of sensory perception pure and simple, and thus a definitive degradation of the image. Should it not be said, therefore, that the more successful this reduction is, the more the sense of the imaginal is lost, and the more we are condemned to producing only the imaginary?

2. In the second place, all imagery, the scenic perspective of a tale like the voyage to the Green Island, or the sudden encounter with the Imam in an unknown oasis-would all this be possible without the absolutely primary and irreducible, objective, initial fact (Urphanomen) of a world of image-archetypes or image-sources whose origin is nonrational and whose incursion into our world is unforeseeable, but whose postulate compels recognition?

3. In the third place, is it not precisely this postulate of the objectivity of the imaginal world that is suggested to us, or imposed on us, by certain forms or certain symbolic emblems (hermetic, kabbalistic; or mandalas) that have the quality of effecting a magic display of mental images, such that they assume an objective reality?

To indicate in what sense it is possible to have an idea of how to respond to the question concerning the objective reality of supernatural figures and encounters with them, I will simply refer to an extraordinary text, where Villiers de L’Isle-Adam speaks about the face of the inscrutable Messenger with eyes of clay; it “could not be perceived except by the spirit. Creatures experience only influences that arc inherent in the archangelic entity. “Angels,” he writes, “are not, in substance, except in the free sublimity of the absolute Heavens, where reality is unified with the ideal…. They only externalize themselves in the ecstasy they cause and which forms a part of themselves.”23

Those last words, an ecstasy … which forms part of themselves, seem to me to possess a prophetic clarity, for they have the quality of piercing even the granite of doubt, of paralyzing the “agnostic reflex,” in the sense that they break the reciprocal isolation of the consciousness and its object, of thought and being; phenomenology is now an ontology. Undoubtedly, this is the postulate implied in the teaching of our authors concerning the imaginal. For there is no external criterion for the manifestation of the Angel, other than the manifestation itself. The Angel is itself the ekstasis, the “displacement” or the departure from ourselves that is a “change of state” from our state. That is why these words also suggest to us the secret of the supernatural being of the “Hidden Imam” and of his Appearances for the Shi’ite consciousness: the Imam is the ekstasis itself of that consciousness. One who is not in the same spiritual state cannot see him.

This is what Sohravardi alluded to in his tale of “The Crimson Archangel” by the words that we cited at the beginning: “If you are Khezr, you also may pass without difficulty through the mountain of Qaf.”

March 1964

 

Notes

1. See LArcbange empourpre, quinze traitis et ricits mystiques, Documents spirituels 14 (Paris: Fayard, 1976), 6: 201-213. For the entirety of the themes discussed here, see our book En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, new ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), vol. 4, bk. 7, “Le Douzieme Imam et la chevalerie spirituelle.”

2. See L’Archange empourpre, 7: 227-239.

3. See our Histoire de la philosophic islamique (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1: 222 ff., 317 ff.

4. That is why the representation of the Sphere of Spheres in Peripatetic or Ptolemaic astronomy is only a schematic indication; it continues to be of value even after this astronomy is abandoned. This means that regardless of how “high” rockets or sputniks can reach, there will not be a single step made toward Na-koja-Abad, for the “threshold” will not have been crossed.

5. Regarding this idea of presence, see particularly our introduction to Molla Sadra Shirazi, Le Livre des penetrations metaphysiques (Kitab al-Masha’ir), edition and French translation (Bibliotheque Iranienne, vol. 10), Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1964, index under this term.

6. See our work Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), especially the texts of the eleven authors translated for the first time, in the second part of the work. The notes here refer to the second French edition, Corps spirituel et Terre celeste: de l’Iran mazdeen a l’ran shi’ite (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1979).

7. Corps spirituel, p. 147.

8. For what follows, ibid., pp. 103, 106, 112 ff., 154 ff.

9. Ibid., pp. 156 ff., 190 ff.

10. Ibid., pp. 112 ff., 154 ff.

11. Ibid., p. 155

12. Ibid., p. 112.

13. Ibid., p. 113.

14. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and its Wonders and Hell, trans. J. C. Ager (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1900), §§ 191 to 195. Swedenborg returns repeatedly to this doctrine of space and time-for example in the short book Earths in the Universe. If there is not rigorous awareness of this, his visionary experiences will be objected to by a criticism that is as simplistic as it is ineffective, because it confuses spiritual vision of the spiritual world with what relates to the fantasy of science fiction. There is an abyss between the two.

15. See our article “La place de Molla Sadrda Shirazi (ob. 1050/1640) clans la philosophie iranienne,” Studia Islamica (1963), as well as the work cited above, note 5.

16. See our work L’Imagination creatrice dans le souftsme d’Ibn ‘Arabi, 2nd ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 139. (First edition translated as Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969].) Regarding the theory of the Angeli caelestes, see our book Avicenne et le Recit visionnaire, vol. 1, Bibliotheque Iranienne, vol. 4 (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1954; 2nd ed., Paris: Berg international, 1982). English translation of the first edition: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

17. For more details, see En Islam iranien, vol. 4, bk. 7; and our Histoire de la philosophic islamique, pp. 101 ff.

18. See En Islam iranien, vol. 4, bk. 7, pp. 346 ff.

19. Ibid., pp. 361-362.

20. Ibid., p. 373.

21. Ibid., § 3, pp. 367 ff.

22. Ibid., § 4, pp. 374 ff.

23. Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, L’Annonciateur (epilogue).

=========================

parzifal says, “Read deeply!”

 

Using Stories to Explore Gnosis

Every once and a while I find a story that has significant evocative powers–abilities to draw from us (me) a sense of that inner spark we seek to manifest.  When I find them I will publish them here so you can read them as well.  This one is from Jordan Stratdord’s+ Blog.

========================

A Jordan Stratford Story, from his Blog

 

Once upon a time a young girl was walking along an African beach. She saw a small, smooth, black stone, and put it in the pocket of her dress. She liked the way it rubbed against her thumb, and she wondered how the stone got to be on the beach, whether it had washed ashore from distant lands, or belonged to a great black mountain that had worn away on that very spot. She imagined great trees and wild animals alive on that mountain – she swore the stone remembered the perfume of those trees and the night-cries of the animals. The stone nestled in her tightly closed palm, both secure in the pocket of her dress, as she walked home, and days later to the park, and years later to school, and years later still on an eventful train traveling through South Africa.

The young Indian man on the train was a law student, well dressed, and there was an air of confident calm about him. The girl, now a young woman, felt a kind of love for the man that wasn’t romantic, but she was compelled to… to what? Kiss him? Speak to him? No. From her pocket she pulled her thumbworn stone, centered it in her open palm, and presented it to the young man, who’s warm brown eyes locked hers and smiled in silent understanding.

The lawyer would one day be known as Mahatma Gandhi. Legend has it he offered the stone to a salt merchant in India, who in turn gave it to his son, a hand on a container ship. In Marseilles, the sailor’s eyes met that of an elderly baker; again the stone was passed on, and again, to reside in the top desk drawer of an eccentric Swiss patent clerk. The clerk would weigh the stone absently while he dreamt of the nature of time, and of light.

Albert Einstein gave the stone to his housekeeper – unsure of what compelled him to do so – and she in turn gave the stone to her niece, who was distraught at the death of her infant child. This is how the stone came to rest on a windowsill cluttered with bird skulls, chinese coins, and small bronzes of Hindu gods. The window looked out a lake, and the lake looked back into the office of Carl Jung, who mailed the stone to an antiquities dealer in Ostende, who presented it to his younger brother, visiting from New York. And on and on, the stone at once reflecting and absorbing the light around it, the narrative arcs and imperfections of the lives it touched.

I will tell you this; the stone is here in my breast pocket right now, next to my heart. It reminds me that the story is larger than my life, that it has been the companion of great men and women, and little men and women, and angry and flawed men and women. The stone is older than what I want or who I am. It ennobles me and it humbles me. And one day the stone will leave my pocket and I will die.

Now I will tell you this: there is no stone.

Rather, there is a laying on of hands and a blessing in a language once rich with life and now reserved only for such blessings, and the arcane magics of medicine and law. All the same, there was someone who touched someone who touched someone famous, and that famous someone touched someone who was a scoundrel, and the scoundrel touched someone who saw the blessing for what it was and not the mere tricksterism of a fool, so he touched someone and so on down through the centuries. And then there was my blessing, the hands on my head and the smell of dust and incense, and the ancient words spoken. And those words here, next to my heart, larger and older than anything I can possibly be alone.

==================

“The Stone that Was NOT There, eh”  says Parzifal